Meta-Awareness of Dysregulated Emotional Attention

Abstract

By selecting from a sea of potential environmental inputs in a manner that is context sensitive, flexible, and goal relevant, attention enables adaptive pursuit of reward and escape from threat (Vuilleumier, 2005). Accordingly, dysregulation in attentional processing of emotional information, commonly referred to as attentional bias (AB), has been implicated in the etiology and maintenance of prevalent forms of maladaptation, including anxiety, depression, and addiction, and thus is a promising intervention target (Heeren, De Raedt, Koster, & Philippot, 2013; Van Bockstaele et al., 2014). Yet the field has faced growing concerns about the weak psychometric properties of cognitive-experimental measures of AB, mixed evidence of the role of AB in psychopathology, and mixed evidence of efforts to experimentally and clinically modify AB (Bar

Mapping Dynamic Interactions Among Cognitive Biases in Depression

“…During training, participants were instructed to allocate attention toward positive words of scrambled sentences (e.g., born winner am loser a I) to efficiently construct positive meanings using five of the six displayed words. Participants were provided with personalized gaze-contingent feedback to increase awareness of attention allocation and promote self-regulatory control as well as goal-directed shifting (see also Bernstein & Zvielli, 2014; Ruimi et al, 2018). In this way, the training procedure targets reallocation of attention to create interpretations that are more positive (and may influence emotional LTM; see Everaert et al, 2014).…”

Dynamics of Internal Attention and Internally-Directed Cognition: The Attention-to-Thoughts (A2T) Model

“…across an entire task or taskblock) may fail to capture the key signal/effects (Algom et al, 2004). Rather, it may be more conceptually accurate to make hypotheses and empirical tests on the momentary temporal level -e.g., to examine momentary affective changes as both antecedents (predictors) and consequences (outcome) of momentary control failures and vice-versa (Ruby et al, 2013;Ruimi et al, 2018;Smallwood & Schooler, 2015).…”

Revisiting Imagery in Psychopathology: Why Mechanisms Are Important

“…Furthermore, meta-awareness of momentary attentional bias towards emotional information leads to greater regulation of subsequent behavior. By contrast, inadequate meta-awareness may prolong dysregulated attentional behavior (29). Another cognitive process underpinning MI is inhibition.…”

“…The attentional mechanisms supporting motor simulation/imagery are also relevant to imagery rescripting interventions because during rescripting they may help to create and bias a competitive retrieval preference for a new, less harmful (motor) memory of a traumatic event (38). Regarding higher-level control, research indicates that most individuals have a capacity for metacognitive processing (29). Interventions focusing on meta-cognition in mental health treatments is not new (28), and some, for example, in the interpersonal therapy domain [e.g., Ref.…”