The Big Idea
This term describes the tendency to direct attention toward or away from particular emotional information.
What is attentional bias?
Participants completed this task to measure attentional bias toward or away from emotional faces.
What is the emotional dot-probe task?
This noninvasive technique uses electrodes to deliver a weak electrical current to the brain.
What is transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS?
Participants with lower trait negative affect displayed this level of attentional bias.
What is no significant attentional bias?
Right prefrontal stimulation eliminated the higher-negative-affect group’s attentional bias toward this emotion.
What is anger?
The study examined whether this stable personality characteristic influences attentional responses to emotional stimuli.
What is dispositional affect, or trait affect?
These three emotional expressions were paired with neutral faces during the task.
What are happy, angry, and sad expressions?
The researchers applied active stimulation to the left and right sides of this specific brain region.
What is the prefrontal cortex, or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex?
Participants with higher trait negative affect directed their attention toward faces displaying this emotion.
What is anger?
Right prefrontal stimulation caused participants with higher trait negative affect to direct attention toward this emotion.
What is sadness?
The researchers were interested in this type of dispositional affect.
What is negative affect?
After the two faces disappeared, participants identified the location of this visual target.
What is a dot-probe?
This inactive stimulation condition allowed the researchers to compare active stimulation with a control.
What is sham tDCS?
Participants with higher trait negative affect directed their attention away from faces displaying this emotion.
What is sadness?
Stimulation of this side of the prefrontal cortex eliminated all measured emotional attentional biases in participants with higher trait negative affect.
What is the left prefrontal cortex?
The study investigated whether the right and left sides of this brain region play different roles in controlling attention to emotions.
What is the prefrontal cortex?
A faster response when the dot replaced the emotional face indicated attention moving in this direction.
What is toward the emotional face?
Each participant completed this number of experimental sessions.
What is three?
A bias toward angry faces may indicate difficulty doing this after noticing threatening emotional information.
What is disengaging attention?
Among participants with lower trait negative affect, left prefrontal stimulation produced an attentional bias away from faces displaying this emotion.
What is happiness?
The primary research question asked whether the effect of prefrontal stimulation on emotional attention depends on this individual characteristic.
What is a person’s level of trait negative affect?
A faster response when the dot replaced the neutral face indicated this response to the emotional face.
What is attentional avoidance, or attention away from the emotional face?
The three sessions involved these three stimulation conditions.
What are sham stimulation, right prefrontal stimulation, and left prefrontal stimulation?
The differing results under sham stimulation suggest that this personality trait influences attentional responses to negative emotions.
What is trait negative affect?
Overall, the findings demonstrate that the effects of prefrontal stimulation on emotional attention depend strongly on this factor.
What is an individual’s level of trait negative affect?