Validating and eliminating the attention bias to negative information

There is a growing body of research documenting information processing biases toward negative information. For example, previous research has shown that negative stimuli elicit more attention than do positive stimuli. That is, there is an attention bias toward negative information. However, the research demonstrating the attention bias has largely relied on response-based measures to assess attention. By only using response-based measures, researchers have left open the possibility that differences attributed to attentional processing may actually be the result of differences in a subsequent information processing stage. In order to rule out this alternative explanation, the current research uses the P1 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) as a more proximal measure of attention allocation. In Experiments 1 and 2, negative stimuli resulted in larger P1s than did positive stimuli, suggesting they were receiving more attention. Further, the speed with which positive and negative stimuli were differentiated, less than 100 milliseconds after stimulus onset, is the fastest differentiation of positive and negative stimuli to have been shown.;Having established that the attention bias occurs at the attention allocation stage of processing, two further experiments were conducted to test whether this bias can be attenuated by the evaluative context in which people find themselves. Specifically, we primed participants with positive and negative information, and measured the amount of attention they allocated to positive and negative information. Using both the P1 component of the ERP (Experiment 3) and a Stroop color naming task (Experiment 4), the results suggested that the attention bias to negative information is attenuated when positive constructs are made accessible. The implications of these results for the nature and functioning of the affect system and the self-reinforcing nature of emotional disorders are discussed.