It is well known that emotion can modulate attentional processes. Previous studies have shown that even under restricted awareness, emotional facial expressions (especially threat-related) can guide the direction of spatial attention. However, it remains unclear whether emotional facial expressions under restricted awareness can affect temporal attention. To address this issue, we used a modifi...

When an observer detects a target in a rapid stream of visual stimuli, there is a brief period of time during which the detection of subsequent targets is impaired. In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from normal adult observers to determine whether this "attentional blink" reflects a suppression of perceptual processes or an impairment in postperceptual processes. No s...

Previous studies on attentional biases often show contradictory results. This suggests that important moderating variables have been neglected so far. We suggest that (1) control over potential consequences and (2) satisfaction with the current status are important factors that need to be considered. We explored the influence of these variables using a colour classification task, where colours ...

Words are tools that pilot attention. As such, they can be analyzed in terms of the attentional changes they convey. In this article, the process by which words produce attentional changes in the subject hearing or reading them is examined. A very important step in this process is represented by the subject’s conscious experience of the meaning of words. The conscious experience of the meaning ...

Objective: This study aimed to investigate the role of negative and positive affectivity, selffocused attention, and attentional control in social anxiety symptoms.  Methods: A sample of 382 students of Isfahan University was selected and the participants completed Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN), Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), Attentional Control Scale (ACS), and Focus...

BACKGROUND Early life stress is associated with poorer social functioning. Attentional biases in response to threat-related cues, linked to both early experience and psychopathology, may explain this association. To date, however, no study has examined attentional biases to fearful facial expressions as a function of early life stress or examined these biases as a potential mediator of the rela...

We describe the operation of our argumentation system, and discuss its use of attentional focus during both content planning and argument presentation. During content planning, attentional focus guides an abductive process used to build-up arguments. This process is applied to a model of a user's • beliefs and a normative model. During argument presentation, attentional focus supports the gener...

Despite an initial focus on negative threatening stimuli, researchers have more recently expanded the investigation of attentional biases toward positive rewarding stimuli. The present meta-analysis systematically compared attentional bias for positive compared with neutral visual stimuli across 243 studies (N = 9,120 healthy participants) that used different types of attentional paradigms and ...