title: Out of mind, out of heart: attention affects duration of emotional experience.
abstract: It has been suggested that the extent to which a person maintains attention to pleasant versus unpleasant aspects of a given stimulus has an effect on the self-reported affective state. This assumption was empirically tested in two experiments. In Study 1, participants received the instruction either to focus on a positive emotion-eliciting event (winning a tournament chess game) or to focus their attention on an affectively neutral distraction task (describing drawings). Study 2 used negative performance feedback in a cognitive task to induce unpleasant affect and included three experimental groups (waiting condition, continuing with the same cognitive task, distraction by a different cognitive task). Results converged to show that distracting attention away from the emotion-eliciting event leads to a shorter duration of the emotional experience. These findings support the attention-focus hypothesis.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, CH-8050 Zurich, Switzerland. freund@psychologie.uzh.ch
authors.forename: Alexandra M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Freund
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Keil
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D004644:Emotions; D030141:Feedback, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011597:Psychomotor Performance