The present study investigates the restorative effects of natural and urban environments on attentional control and emotional states. Utilizing the Additional Singleton task, participants were...Show moreThe present study investigates the restorative effects of natural and urban environments on attentional control and emotional states. Utilizing the Additional Singleton task, participants were tested for reaction times and accuracy before and after exposure to images of nature and urban settings. Contrary to the Attention Restoration Theory (ART), which posits a superiority of natural settings in restoring directed attention, our results indicated that exposure to urban environments enhanced attentional control in situations where distractive stimuli are present. The results revealed that exposure to urban scenery can have restorative benefits on attentional capture, mitigating attentional fatigue and resulting in improved reaction times and accuracy in a visual search task following exposure. Exposure to urban environments resulted in a decline in positive affect, while both types of scenery led to reduced negative affect. Participants exhibited a preference for natural over urban scenery, although this preference did not correlate with changes in attentional or emotional measures. The findings challenge the prevailing notion of the distinct advantage of natural environments in cognitive and emotional restoration and suggest that urban settings also might possess restorative qualities. Future studies should investigate the specific aspects of urban environments that contribute to these outcomes, emphasizing the importance of comprehensively understanding how different environmental factors affect overall well-being.Show less
Previous research suggests an association between attentional control and rumination, supported by the impaired disengagement hypothesis. According to the impaired disengagement hypothesis,...Show morePrevious research suggests an association between attentional control and rumination, supported by the impaired disengagement hypothesis. According to the impaired disengagement hypothesis, individuals with low attentional control are more likely to experience increased rumination due to difficulties in disengaging from negative thoughts. A relationship between rumination and poor sleep quality has also been previously investigated and the findings are in line with the concept of perseverative cognition. As illustrated by the concept of perseverative cognition, rumination has been associated with poor sleep quality because the cognitive arousal that accompanies rumination may lead to physiological arousal resulting in unsuitable conditions for quality sleep. However, the potential mediating role of rumination in the relationship between attentional control and sleep quality has not yet been fully elucidated. The primary aim of the current study was to investigate whether rumination significantly mediates the relationship between attentional control and sleep quality. I expected increased rumination to mediate the relationship between low attentional control and poor subjective sleep quality. 69 healthy university students completed questionnaires including measures of attentional control, rumination, and sleep quality. A mediation analysis and a bootstrap was employed to test the significance of the indirect effects. Results showed that rumination fully mediated that effects of attentional control on sleep quality. A bootstrap analysis confirmed the significance of the mediation model. Targeting attentional control and rumination may prove beneficial in treatments for poor sleep quality. Interventions such as mindfulness-based therapy have been successful in reducing rumination, whereas attentional training technique has shown promising results in improving attentional control.Show less
Background: The personality factors neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion, as well as threat-related attentional bias are significantly associated with anxiety disorders,...Show moreBackground: The personality factors neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion, as well as threat-related attentional bias are significantly associated with anxiety disorders, transdiagnostically. Hypothesis: These personality constructs are correlated with attentional bias, and it might be through this that they create vulnerability for anxiety. Methods: The cross-sectional experimental study (N = 40) administered a dual-probe-task with neutral, mildly-threatening, and highly-threatening images. Results: Significant negative associations with big effect sizes were found between conscientiousness and attending towards threat. More conscientious individuals automatically attended away from mild-threats. Conclusion and Implications: A pathway through which conscientiousness may be acting to create vulnerability for anxiety was proposed. The goal engagement system, as hypothesized in the cognitive- motivational model by Mogg & Bradley, keeps the attention automatically on goal-related stimuli in the absence of a perceived true threat in the environment. The current study adds a new layer to this model, illustrating how intact one’s goal engagement system, even in the absence of pathologic anxiety, is on a spectrum, and can be operationalized by one’s conscientiousness level. Individuals with lower levels of conscientiousness would not have a strong goal engagement system, not resulting in an automatic avoidance of mild-threats, leading overtime to an accumulation of evidence for negative cues, making it easier to form cognitive distortions, predisposing one to anxiety. Increasing conscientiousness might be a promising psychotherapeutic target. Crucial for the anxiety-related attentional bias research field, exploratory analyses showed conscientiousness to be a more important predictor of attentional bias, compared to attentional control. Future attentional bias studies should assess conscientiousness.Show less
Background: Threat-related attentional biases (ABs) in anxiety show considerable heterogeneity; there is evidence for hypervigilance to, and avoidance of threat. Taking the stimulus threat level...Show moreBackground: Threat-related attentional biases (ABs) in anxiety show considerable heterogeneity; there is evidence for hypervigilance to, and avoidance of threat. Taking the stimulus threat level and attentional control (AC) into account is thought to aid in explaining this heterogeneity. Prior work on the relations between these variables showed inconclusive results. Hypotheses: Trait anxiety levels, AC levels, and their interaction are associated with different patterns of AB scores, depending on the stimulus’s threat level. Methods: Fifty-two participants completed self-report measures of trait anxiety and AC and participated in a dot-probe task with neutral, mild threat, and high threat pictorial stimuli. Hypotheses were tested with rm ANOVAs and post-hoc correlation tests. Results: High trait anxiety was associated with hypervigilant AB to mild threat, but no association with AB to high threat was found. Low AC was related to more avoidance of high threat, but not to AB to mild threat. AC did not moderate the relationship between trait anxiety and threat-level dependent AB. Discussion and Conclusions: These findings confirm that threat level influences threat-related ABs in anxiety. While this relationship was not further influenced by individual differences in AC, the role AC on its own plays in threat-level dependent ABs is supported.Show less
It is hypothesized that anxiety disorders can be caused and maintained by defective, biased, or negative manners of attentional processing of threatening information. In much previous research the...Show moreIt is hypothesized that anxiety disorders can be caused and maintained by defective, biased, or negative manners of attentional processing of threatening information. In much previous research the role of attentional control and stimulus threat level in this process have been much neglected. The current study aimed to partly replicate two previous studies that did study these factors. Fifty-two female participants between the ages 18 and 30 completed the questionnaires for both trait anxiety and attentional control. Afterwards the participants performed a dot-probe task with neutral, mild and high threat pictures. Results showed that trait anxiety is related to on attentional bias towards mild threat but does not matter for high threat. Results also showed that lower attentional control resulted in more vigilance towards mild than high threat. Unexpectedly, we did not find significant results for the three-way interaction between threat level, trait anxiety and attentional control. We conclude that trait anxiety, stimulus threat level and attentional control are related to attentional bias, consequently it is very important to take individual differences for anxiety, attentional control and stimulus threat level into account.Show less
The study examines the relationship between theta/beta ratio (TBR) and mind wandering (MW), an important aspect in the domain of attentional control. Contemporary research suggests that high TBR ...Show moreThe study examines the relationship between theta/beta ratio (TBR) and mind wandering (MW), an important aspect in the domain of attentional control. Contemporary research suggests that high TBR (the ratio of power in the theta band to power in the beta band) can be used as an indicator of attentional lapses, i.e. MW. To investigate this notion, an experimental study was conducted. 79 participants completed a sustained attention task while brain activity was measured using electroencephalography. Additionally, it was examined whether TBR is associated with impeded resilience to emotional interference during a working memory task. Moreover, the role of fatigue as a secondary factor was investigated as it potentially further deteriorates MW. No significant relationship between TBR and MW or WM could be found. Further, TBR was not associated with working memory performance. Finally, fatigue was not correlated to MW occurrence. In conclusion, the relationship between TBR and MW could not be confirmed. However, this study is a step towards studying internal experiences without reliance on introspection.Show less
