Attentional Bias and Well-Being

Abstract

This chapter reviews work that has sought to examine how biased patterns of attentional responding to affectively valenced information can contribute to variability in both emotional and situational well-being. It begins by critically appraising the cognitive–experimental procedures that have most commonly been employed to assess such attentional bias. Next, the chapter considers findings from research that have employed these assessment approaches to investigate how individual differences in attentional bias toward either negatively toned or positively toned affective information may contribute to variability in emotional disposition. The chapter then discusses research that has examined how the selective processing of aversive information concerning prospective threat and selective attentional responding to positively toned appetitive stimulus information may impact the prospect of engaging in behaviors that have the capacity to enhance or impair situational well-being. In doing so, this chapter highlights the possibility that these types of attentional biases may directly contribute to dissociation between emotional and situational well-being, either by evoking negative emotion while also increasing the prospect of adaptive behavior or by evoking positive emotion while increasing the prospect of maladaptive behavior.

Individual differences in wellbeing are supported by separable sets of co-active self- and visual-attention-related brain networks

“…These results suggest that individual differences in wellbeing might arise when people develop unique but stable attentional strategies for sampling that external world. This is consistent with research showing that mood impacts visual attention (29, 135) and sensory attentional biases are associated with mental health and contribute to wellbeing (136, 137). This warrants expanding the initial framework presented here to include three general neurobiological contributions to individual differences in wellbeing.…”

Room for Feelings: A “Working Memory” Account of Affective Processing

“…As noted in the introduction, affective information processing is typically prioritized because of its general significance for adaptive behavior (e.g., Bradley, 2009). Whereas such selective attention mechanisms may thus serve important survival functions, extreme or chronic attentional biases to affective information have been found to concur with lower well-being (Grafton & MacLeod, 2019) and maladaptive behaviors such as overeating (Hou et al, 2011) and aggression (Van Honk et al, 2001), as well as a variety of psychopathologies that involve affective dysregulation, such as anxiety disorders (Cis & Kosler, 2010), addiction (Field & Cox, 2008), and depression (Gotlib & Joormann, 2010).…”