Attentional patterns as emotion regulation strategies during the anticipation of repetitive emotional scenes: an eye-tra
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Attentional patterns as emotion regulation strategies during the anticipation of repetitive emotional scenes: an eye‑tracker study Natalia Poyato1 · Carmelo Vazquez1 Received: 16 January 2020 / Accepted: 2 November 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract As difficulties in managing the anticipation of situations is one of the characteristics of emotional problems, the study of regulatory strategies during anticipatory period anticipation is important. In the present study, attentional patterns during the anticipation period were studied. The ability of those attentional patterns to regulate mood after the event’s occurrence was analyzed. An experimental paradigm was designed in which participants repeatedly anticipated emotional information. Attentional patterns in response to emotionally expressive faces (happy and sad) were recorded with an eye tracker. The results showed that the valence of the expected outcomes did affect attentional preferences. Specifically, participants spent more time looking at sad faces when they anticipated a negative rather than a positive outcome. The opposite pattern was found for happy faces. With respect to the ability to regulate the emotions of these attention patterns, it was found that emotions experienced after a negatively anticipated event were independent of previous attention patterns, while happiness experienced after a previously anticipated positive event was found to be related to attentional patterns. Specifically, people who spent more time looking at happy faces during the anticipation of a positive outcome reported higher levels of happiness after the event. In conclusion, these results indicate that during the anticipation of emotional outcomes participants implement attentional strategies, although the emotions associated with experiencing those outcomes were independent of those attentional patterns in the negative anticipation, they were found to magnify positive emotions in positive anticipation.
Introduction While sitting in a room waiting for a distressing dental procedure, what stimuli from the surrounding environment would you direct your attention to? Perhaps you would try to distract yourself by looking at some amusing magazines on the table? Would you listen carefully to try and hear the dental equipment buzzing behind the door in the examination room? It is apparent that automatic mechanisms of deployment to attention are relevant for coping emotionally with future positive or negative events, which includes preparatory strategies to regulate our emotions when presented with the actual events. Yet, research on selective attentional mechanisms in these situations is relatively scarce.
* Carmelo Vazquez [email protected] 1
Department of Clinical Psychology, School of Psychology, Complutense University of Madrid, 28223 Madrid, Spain
The emotion regulation model proposed by Gross (2014) is perhaps the most articulated explanatory framework aimed at understanding how emotional responses are associ
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