Exploring Interactions Between Attention, Emotion, and Memory using Mood Induction Procedures

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During the past decade a great deal of research has focused on the interactions between cognition and emotion. Cognition researchers, traditionally unconcerned with emotion and often viewing cognition and emotion as separate entities, are now documenting important interactions between emotion, memory, and attention. Although researchers have learned a great deal about how mood can affect memory, much less is known of how negative and positive mood states affect selective attention. The focus of the proposed research program will be on the intersection of these domains: my research will examine how mood affects selective attention and memory for emotional information. All the proposed studies will use eye gaze tracking and recording to assess how individuals attend to emotional and neutral images. The ability to precisely monitor and record an individual's gaze will allow my team to explore individual differences in the moment-by-moment processing of information, from the initial orientation of attention to subsequent shifts of attention between multiple images. Our research will advance the understanding of emotion-attention interactions via several lines of inquiry. We will incorporate experiments contrasting experimentally-induced moods (using positive and negative mood induction procedures) and experiments contrasting individuals varying in naturally occurring moods (e.g., individuals scoring high or low on measures of dysphoric mood). We will also examine age-related differences in attention to emotion. In all our studies we will determine how effects of emotion on attention influence memory. Selective attention and emotion are the two main brain systems used to prioritize human behavioral responses, and research on attention-emotion interactions, and their impact on memory, addresses fundamental brain and cognitive processes. The use of eye tracking methods is a valuable and timely addition to existing behavioral and neuroimaging studies addressing similar questions. Our research will determine how and why visual attention is influenced by an observer's affective state and what impact this has on memory accuracy, key issues for theories of emotion-attention interaction.