| The current series of studies investigate the role of attentional deployment in healthy emotion regulation. In our first study we validated a series of film clips to induce emotions of happiness, sadness, no emotion, fear, and mirth. In our second and third studies we examined whether shifts in attentional deployment following the introduction of affect were related to mood reactivity, dysphoria, and subjective well-being. The results suggest that under certain circumstances, healthy young adults may regulate their emotion using relatively automatic shifts in attention, and how they deploy attention to regulate emotion may be related to their overall emotional health (lower levels of dysphoria and higher levels of well-being) at the time of the experiment and several weeks later. Future directions and clinical implications of these findings are discussed. |
