Regulating the blink: Cognitive reappraisal modulates attention

2014

Our brain is unable to fully process all the sensory signals we encounter. Attention is the process that helps selecting input from all available information for detailed processing and it is largely influenced by the affective value of the stimuli. This study examined if attentional bias towards emotional stimuli can be modulated by cognitively changing their emotional value. Participants were presented with negative and neutral images from four different scene-categories depicting humans (‘Reading’, ‘Working’, ‘Crying’ and ’Violence’). Using cognitive reappraisal subjects decreased and increased the negativity of one negative (e.g., ‘Crying’) and one neutral (e.g., ‘Reading’) category res…