| Attentional deployment is a primary strategy individuals employ to regulate emotion. Study 1 investigated whether visuo-spatial, goal-directed, attentional deployment to emotional faces serves as an effective mechanism for emotion regulation and whether individual differences in this ability predicts more effective emotion regulation. Participants given a goal to focus on positively valenced faces reported nearly three times less frustration in reaction to a stressful anagram task compared to those not given this goal. In addition, those with a greater ability to focus on happy faces and avoid angry faces persisted significantly longer on a stressful anagram task. In Study 2, a measure of an individual's ability to deploy attention toward and away from emotional mental representations was developed. This measure of attentional control capacity for emotion (ACCE) adapted an explicit-cuing task switching paradigm where participants had to shift between emotional and neutral mental sets. Results showed that those higher in trait anxiety and worrisome thoughts took longer to switch from a neutral to an emotional mental set. In Study 3, participants were given a stressful anagram task and those who switched more efficiently from a neutral set to an emotional set were more frustrated by the stressful task. In addition, those who switched more efficiently from an emotional set to a neutral set persisted longer on the stressful task. These studies demonstrated that both visuo-spatial attentional deployment and attentional deployment to emotional mental representations are important to an individual's ability to regulate emotion. |
