Emotional Regulation Function Of Attention Biases And Its Influence On Risky Decisions

Attentional bias, which was originally found clinical population, is defined as automatic allocation of attention towards threatening and negative information, or more difficult to disengage attention from negative from neutral or positives stimuli. Such negativity bias is typically interpreted as an adaptive function in evolution because prompt detection of danger is more meaningful for survival. But, such inflexible negativity bias of attention regardless of specific situation is also considered as important factor leading to clinical symptoms such as anxiety, depression or phobia. Attentional bias modification is an emerging treatment approach designed to concatenate attention to positive emotional information as therapeutic interventions for emotional pathology. However, studies exploring relations between attentional bias and emotional consequences only have emerged in recent two years, which providing mechanism evidence for those clinical practices.The aims of the present research are to test causal relationship of attentional bias and emotion, and to explore the emotional regulation function of manipulated attentional biases and its influence on risky decisions. The basic procedure of our study is:Use the instruction to manipulate the participates’attention biased to emotional stimuli with different valence (to positive stimuli, to negative stimuli or browsing freely) through the experiment, present them positive and negative emotional stimuli (emotional pictures in experimentl, positive and negative numbers as a feedback of preceding game named "grab the red envelops" in experiment 2 and 3) in the same screen simultaneously. Then the participants report scores of their emotional status (in experiment 2), or make a choice among three options with different degree of risk in the following gamble game (in experiment 3).All participants in our four experiments indicated a negative bias towards negative stimuli in the early stage of attention. In experiment 1, after exposed to emotional pictures (face and scene) both positive and negative, participates who were instructed to pay attention to positive pictures reported a larger increment of positive emotion that the control group who were instructed to look at pictures freely. In experiment 2 and 3, we manipulated the attention bias to the numerical feedback of a game "grab the red envelops", and found that the group whose attention were biased to positive numerical feedback reported higher positive emotion scores than the group who looked freely (experiment 2), and the group whose attention were biased to negative numerical feedback chose more low risky options than the group looked freely in the following gamble game (experiment 3). These results suggested that attentional bias towards the positive aspect of event could up-regulate emotion, while attentional bias towards negative aspect could reduce risky behavior, which provided strong evidence for the possibility of developing attentional biases as an emotion regulation strategy, as well as mechanism evidence for emotional improvement of those clinical practices about attentional biases modification or training.