Ostracism-being excluded and ignored-thwarts satisfaction of four fundamental needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. The current study investigated whether training participants to focus their attention on the here-and-now (i.e., focused attention) reduces distress from an ostracism experience. Participants were first trained in either focused or unfocused attention, ...

When attention is diffuse, as in a visual search task, an abrupt onset almost invariably succeeds in capturing attention. But if attention had been cued in advance to a different location, the same onset may then fail to capture attention (Theeuwes, 1991; Yantis and Jonides, 1990). In previous demonstrations, the onset appeared frequently. This may have diminished the onset's novelty, which in ...

Behavioral and neuroimaging findings indicate that distinct cognitive and neural processes underlie solving problems with sudden insight. Moreover, people with less focused attention sometimes perform better on tests of insight and creative problem solving. However, it remains unclear whether different states of attention, within individuals, influence the likelihood of solving problems with in...

background and aim: aging is accompanied with changes in cognitive capacities. in spite of advances in neural imaging technologies, there is not a straightforward method to observe cognitive functions. for assessing brain functions, researchers mainly use psychometric tests. the aim of this study was using consonant-vowel (cv) dichotic test as a non-invasive behavioral test for auditory attenti...