Building upon recent findings that affective states can influence the allocation of spatial attention, we investigate how state, trait and induced mood are related to the temporal allocation of attention to emotional information. In the present study, 125 unscreened undergraduates completed a modified rapid serial visual presentation task designed to assess the time course of attention to posit...

Whether induced-depressed individuals demonstrate a mood congruence effect in unintentional learning is unknown. We manipulated 51 healthy participants into either a happy (n = 25) or a sad mood (n = 26) state and tested their mood-congruent information processing with unintentional learning of negatively charged pictorial stimuli. Participants in the happy mood induction group recognised signi...

BACKGROUND Retrieval of opposite mood autobiographical memories serves emotion regulation, yet the factors influencing this ability are poorly understood. METHODS Three studies examined the effect of mood valence (sad vs. happy) and degree of emotional engagement on fluency of mood incongruent retrieval by manipulating emotional engagement and examining the effect of emotional film clips on t...

The error-related negativity (ERN) is an event-related potential (ERP) that indexes error monitoring. Research suggests that the ERN is increased in internalizing disorders, such as depression and anxiety. Although studies indicate that the ERN is insensitive to state-related fluctuations in anxiety, few studies have carefully examined the effect of state-related changes in sadness on the ERN. ...

Previous descriptive and treatment studies imply that the association between depressed affect and cigarette smoking may be strongest among those with limited cognitive coping skills. This study, therefore, experimentally examined whether the combination of poor mood management skills and negative affect results in reduced self-efficacy and increased temptation to smoke. Current smokers were ra...