Looking on the bright side: The effect of a positive visual attention training intervention on attention and emotion regulation

Individuals experiencing positive visual attention biases may use selective attention as a tool to regulate emotional experience under stressful circumstances. The current study consisted of a one-week longitudinal, positive attention training intervention that sought to train participants' (N = 70) attention toward either positive or neutral information. The training task used a dot-probe paradigm where one positive and one neutral word were presented for 500ms and then a visual target appeared consistently in the location of either the positive or neutral word. Participants were instructed to make a simple perceptual discriminatory response to the target.;Immediately before and after the training period, participants completed an eye-tracking task where they viewed a series of varying positive, neutral, and negative image-pairs. Visual fixation time oriented away from negative images, or towards positive images, served as an indicator of using gaze to successfully regulate emotion. While watching the image presentations, participants also continuously rated their mood using an analog slider to further assess emotion regulation during the eye-tracking task. Additionally, participants used experience sampling methodology to rate their momentary emotional experience for the week prior to and following training.;After the training train-positive participants, relative to train-neutral participants, did not show the predicted biases in gaze towards positive information, nor did they show significantly higher positive moods during their post-training eye tracking session versus their pre-training session. There were largely no significant differences in the experience sampling results after training. However, train-positive participants did feel significantly more intensely calm and less frequently interested after the training than train-neutral participants. Overall support for the hypothesis, that the positive training intervention would facilitate emotion regulation, was not found. These findings may be best explained by the failure of the training procedure to generate distinct sets of attentional biases (towards positive or neutral information) in the training groups. Although the current dot-probe training methodology was unsuccessful, other types of attentional training procedures such as meditative interventions may be better suited to facilitate emotion regulation.