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The ability to focus one’s attention underlies success in many everyday tasks, but voluntary attention cannot be sustained for extended periods of time. In the laboratory, sustained-attention failure is manifest as a decline in perceptual sensitivity with increasing time on task, known as the vigilance decrement. We investigated improvements in sustained attention with training (~5 hr/day for 3 months), which consisted of meditation practice that involved sustained selective attention on a chosen stimulus (e.g., the participant’s breath). Participants were randomly assigned either to receive training first (n = 30) or to serve as waiting-list controls and receive training second (n = 30). Training produced improvements in visual discrimination that were linked to increases in perceptual sensitivity and improved vigilance during sustained visual attention. Consistent with the resource model of vigilance, these results suggest that perceptual improvements can reduce the resource demand imposed by target discrimination and thus make it easier to sustain voluntary attention.

This article presents a framework for the organization of affective processes, including the affective traits, moods, and emotions. Section 1 introduces the levels-of-analysis approach, defines the three levels of affect, presents criteria for ordering these levels hierarchically in terms of simple and complex temporally driven processes, and examines the interrelations among the various levels of affect, including an in-depth analysis of affective trait–emotion relationships. Section 2 offers an application of the hierarchical view to research on affect–cognition interactions, including a brief review of affect congruency effects and a discussion of the conceptual and empirical challenges to such research necessitated by consideration of the differences among the levels of affect.

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