{"id":3038,"date":"2017-04-17T22:21:49","date_gmt":"2017-04-18T02:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=3038"},"modified":"2018-05-16T09:38:03","modified_gmt":"2018-05-16T13:38:03","slug":"why-does-everything-bad-happen-to-me-attentional-bias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2017\/04\/17\/why-does-everything-bad-happen-to-me-attentional-bias\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Have I Seen so Many Dogs Today… and Other Effects of the Attentional Bias"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever experienced that feeling where you\u2019re in a bad mood and everything seems to be going wrong that day? Maybe all of your friends seem mad at you, or maybe you do something embarrassing like trip, and you feel\u00a0like everybody is making fun of you.\u00a0 These are basic examples of the phenomenon that cognitive psychologists call the attentional bias. \u00a0This describes the tendency for you to focus on certain pictures, objects, facial expressions, or other stimuli in your environment based on what is dominating your thoughts. \u00a0This means that someone who is very interested in dogs and reads a lot of information about them, or looks at pictures of them online all the time, will tend to focus more on dogs in their environment.<\/p>\n

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Cute dogs<\/p><\/div>\n

Attention is thought to be a selective process, and the amount of it that you direct on a task is\u00a0based on how difficult it is (requiring more attention) and what is important, or has meaning to you. \u00a0The attentional bias uses this selective nature of attention by directing your focus towards things around you that are related to whatever is on your mind. In terms of evolution, it seems logical\u00a0for your brain to develop this cognitive bias (like a short cut) to alert you to dangerous predators in the environment, or maybe even by focusing your attention on food in your environment if you are dying of starvation to help\u00a0you survive.\u00a0 In the modern world we face much less immediate dangers, or if we do they look very different from the predators that our ancestors faced (a car crash versus a lion).\u00a0 However, we are still \u00a0affected by the attentional bias in many different ways.<\/p>\n

The bias can affects you by directing your\u00a0focus to a threat, such as the pain you \u00a0experience everyday. \u00a0One study by Wang et al. (2016<\/a>)\u00a0looked at the attentional bias in situations where we experience pain. \u00a0By tracking people’s eye movements, they found that you are more likely to focus on pictures depicting painful everyday situations versus normal situations if you feel pain, like a hot stimuli, before you look at them. \u00a0So, even the small pain that we experience can affect what we focus on in our environment.<\/p>\n

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A hand getting hit by a hammer<\/p><\/div>\n

The bias can also negatively impact people with habits, like smoking. \u00a0A study by\u00a0Luijten et al. (2011<\/a>)\u00a0using fMRI (a neuro-imaging technique that looks at increased blood flow to show increased activation of certain parts of the brain) showed increased activation of brain areas related to cravings and attention in people who smoke\u00a0versus non-smokers when they are shown smoking related pictures. \u00a0This can make it difficult\u00a0to quit, because your attention is automatically drawn to things in the environment reminding you\u00a0of cigarettes, making you\u00a0crave smoking.<\/p>\n

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Don’t smoke<\/p><\/div>\n

While the bias can affect anyone, it has been shown to specifically affect people with anxiety disorders. \u00a0A study by\u00a0Fox (2017)<\/a> researched the attentional bias in people with anxiety using a modified version of the\u00a0Stroop task (a common method used to study attention) where the participants were shown threatening and non-threatening words in different colors, and asked to say the color, not the word. \u00a0This method is used to study attention because it forces people to use their attentional control to carry out the controlled process of saying the color of the word and stop themselves from doing the automatic process of reading the word, because it is a highly practiced skill. \u00a0Research\u00a0has shown that people with anxiety tend to focus on threatening information, and the study showed that it\u00a0takes longer for the anxious individuals to respond to threatening words than non-threatening words (showing attentional bias), while there is no effect on non-anxious individuals. \u00a0However, the study also showed that the bias may not be selective to threats, because anxious individuals also showed an attentional bias towards distracting words, demonstrating\u00a0that the bias\u00a0may not only affect anxious individuals based on the meaning of the words, but rather because they lack the attentional control required to say the color versus the word.<\/p>\n

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The Stroop Task<\/p><\/div>\n

While the attentional bias can be helpful by directing our attention to certain things or situations in the environment, it can also have negative consequences. \u00a0The bias can make us overly cautious of danger, or make it more difficult to break a bad habit, or contribute to the obsessive nature of anxiety. It can cause us\u00a0to focus only on limited information when making a decision, or make us only consider certain outcomes to a situation instead of having an more open view.\u00a0 It shows how large of an impact\u00a0the way that we think\u00a0can have on how we\u00a0perceive the world.\u00a0 If you are thinking negatively, then you are more likely to focus on negative things in your environment. \u00a0In order to live a happier or more positive life it can be helpful to think about happier and more positive things, so that is what you focus on in the world around you.<\/p>\n

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Think more positively<\/p><\/div>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fox, Elaine. “Attentional Bias In Anxiety: Selective Or Not?”. Behaviour Research and Therapy<\/em> 31.5 (1993): 487-493. Web. 14 Mar. 2017.<\/p>\n

Luijten, Maartje et al. “Neurobiological Substrate Of Smoking-Related Attentional Bias”. NeuroImage<\/em> 54.3 (2011): 2374-2381. Web. 14 Mar. 2017.<\/p>\n

Sun, Z.-K., J.-Y. Wang, and F. Luo. “Experimental Pain Induces Attentional Bias That Is Modified By Enhanced Motivation: An Eye Tracking Study”. European Journal of Pain<\/em> 20.8 (2016): 1266-1277. Web. 14 Mar. 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever experienced that feeling where you\u2019re in a bad mood and everything seems to be going wrong that day? Maybe all of your friends seem mad at you, or maybe you do something embarrassing like trip, and you feel\u00a0like everybody is making fun of you.\u00a0 These are basic examples of the phenomenon that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8037,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80216,266316,130416],"tags":[150202],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8037"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3038"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4520,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038\/revisions\/4520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}