The Influence Of Attention Deployment On Regret

Regret,a common negative emotion in daily life,emerges from the upward counterfactual thinking,i.e.the comparison between the obtained outcome and an unobtained better one.Immersing in regret is harmful to mental health and psychological well-being,and it even induces mental disorder,such as anxiety and depression.Therefore,how to modulate and reduce regret is widely concerned by researchers.Previous researches showed that,negative emotion could be effectively modulated by cognitive reappraisal after its occurrence.Whereas,attention deployment,a common emotion regulation strategy that involves shifting attention towards or away from affective stimuli,could effectively regulate negative emotion before its occurrence.However,it remains elusive whether attention deployment could reduce regret,and what the underlying mechanisms are.In addition,past researches showed that participants would experience varying intensity of regret in different risk situations.To be specific,compared with the low-risk situation,individuals would feel more regret in the high-risk situation.Given that,it is necessary to investigate whether attention deployment could modulate regret in both high-and low-risk situations.In line with it,the modulation of regret by attention deployment and its neural correlates in different risk situations still needed to be revealed.The current thesis investigated the effect of attentional deployment on regret,and its correlated neural activities in spatial(f MRI)as well as temporal(EEG)dimensions respectively,by adopting a sequential risk-taking task.In each trial of the sequential risk-taking task,an array of eight boxes were presented,in which each of seven boxes contained a reward(coin)and one contained a punishment(devil).Participants were told to successively decide whether to open or not to open a box with potential reward/punishment,from left to right.Opening the box with the punishment ended the current trial and all gained coins in that trial would be lost.If participants decided not to open the box,they would collect the rewards acquired so far in the trial.There were three types of attention deployment,that is,GF context(inducing participants to focus on the positive parts of outcomes),MF context(inducing participants to focus on the negative parts of outcomes)and control context(no manipulation of attention).The three types of attention deployment were manipulated via cues and text feedback during the presentation of outcomes.This thesis contained two studies with a total of six experiments.Specifically,Study 1,consisting of behavioral(experiment 1),f MRI(experiment 2)and EEG(experiment 3)experiments,aimed to explore the influence of attention deployment on regret and the underlying neural mechanism in spatial as well as temporal dimensions.Based on Study1,Study 2 tried to explore the influence of attention deployment on regret and the underlying neural mechanism in spatial as well as temporal dimensions in high-and low-risk situations by changing the rewards in each box.Behaviorally,the current thesis found that attention deployment had influence on regret.To be specific,compared with control context,participants felt less regret and the emotional stability was enhanced in GF context.That was to say,as the outcomes getting worse,the level of regret increased more slowly in GF context than that in control context.By introducing the high-and low-risk situations,the current thesis found that the influence of attention deployment on regret was similar in these two risk situations,which meant that the modulation of attention deployment on regret was universal across different risk situations.At the neural level,f MRI results demonstrated that the activation of prefrontal cortex was stronger in GF context than that in control context,which was in accordance with the behavioral results.Interestingly,the brain-behavior correlation analysis revealed that the change of prefrontal cortex activation with outcomes getting better was positively associated with emotional stability.These results consistently suggested that prefrontal cortex played a vital role in the process of modulating regret by attention deployment.EEG results demonstrated that the P2 amplitude was stronger in GF context than that in control context.Furthermore,the source localization during the time window of P2 indicated that the activation of prefrontal cortex was stronger in GF context than that in control context,which was consistent with the findings in f MRI experiments.In summary,the current thesis explored the influence of attention deployment on regret,and the neural correlates in spatial as well as temporal dimensions.The results revealed that attention deployment could affect regret and inducing participants to focus on the positive part of outcomes would reduce regret effectively.Importantly,such effect was universal in high-and low-risk situations.These findings contributed to understand the modulation of attention deployment on regret and provided new insights for future clinical research into disorders associated with regret,e.g.depression and anxiety.