Clearing the mind: A working memory model of distraction from negative mood.

“Notably, the present research focused on the regulation of negative mood, because of its relevance to understanding mood disorders like chronic anxiety and depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2000) and because regulation of negative mood has received most attention in the emotion regulation literature (Gross, 1998).”

“As such, the concept of distraction plays an important role in leading theories of emotion regulation (Bishop, Duncan, & Lawrence, 2004; Rusting & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1998; Trask & Sigmon, 1999).”

“Indeed, many individuals engage in prolonged negative ruminations when they would prefer to entertain more pleasant thoughts (Koole, Smeets, van Knippenberg, & Dijksterhuis, 1999; Kuhl, 1994; Martin & Tesser, 1996).”

“Conversely, engaging the working memory capacity can mitigate negative emotional states (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“In earlier work, we have proposed a working memory account of affective processing, which posits that affective and cognitive processes rely on the same limited mental resources (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“A possible alternative explanation of Experiment 2 might be that the WM load determined a reduced intensity of negative material (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007), thus leading participants to endorse negative false memories to the same extent as the neutral ones.”

“It has been shown that cognitive distraction can influence affective processing and emotional states by relocation of attentional resources (Blair et al., 2007; Erk et al., 2007; Pessoa et al., 2002; van Dillen and Koole, 2007).”

“One clear disengagement down-regulation strategy is distraction, which involves early attentional disengagement from emotional processing by producing unrelated thoughts (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“Numerous methods for regulating negative emotion have been proposed, including distraction (e.g., Van Dillen & Koole, 2007), reappraisal (e.g., Gruber, Hay, & Gross, 2014), mindfulness (e.g., Lutz et al., 2014), and suppression (e.g., Gross & Thompson, 2007).”

“As suggested by Van Dillen and Koole (2007), tasks that are cognitively demanding load our working memory and prevent mood congruent processing (p. 715).”

“A large literature documents the deleterious influence of anxiety on cognition (Eysenck et al. 2007), and conversely the influence of cognition in down-regulating anxiety (McRae et al. 2009; Van Dillen and Koole 2007).”

“In a set of three experiments (Van Dillen and Koole 2007), we systematically varied working memory load of a distracter task and examined its effect on self-reported negative affect.”

“Indeed, findings from basic cognitive research suggest that working memory assists with decoding emotions (Phillips, Channon, Tunstall, Hedenstrom, & Lyons, 2008), emotional responding (Schmeichel, Volokhov, & Demaree, 2008), and distraction from negative moods (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“That is, loading working memory prevents mood-congruent processing to operate (e.g., see Van Dillen & Koole, 2007, for a similar assumption).”

“What makes this difference adaptive is that the distraction draws an individual’s attention away from negative moods to allow for a safer, more neutral one, that allows for less painful processing of emotions (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“Emotion adds value to a situation and enables an individual to take into account situational factors and internal information that is subjectively relevant (Gross, 1998; Van Dillen & Koole, 2007; Koole, Van Dillen, & Sheppes, 2011).”

“Engaging in tasks higher in cognitive demand leads to greater improvements in affect than engaging in tasks lower in cognitive demand (Strick et al., 2009; van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“Other studies have examined the emotionregulation technique distraction (Kanske et al., 2011; McRae et al., 2010; van Dillen & Koole, 2007; for review, see Webb et al., 2012).”

“While working on the DT tasks, respondents are usually encouraged to generate as many unusual or original ideas as possible.”

“Comparable effects were demonstrated in a series of three mood-induction experiments by Van Dillen and Koole (2007).”

“In addition, prevention focus is associated with anxiety and worrying, and regulating these negative affective experiences is taxing as well (Bridgett, Oddi, Laake, Murdock, & Bachmann, 2013; Van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“There is some evidence that specific negative mood states have different effects on cognition (Bartolic et al., 1999; Vosburg, 1998; van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“Conversely, in the context of a situation with high emotionality, distraction (that consists of disengaging attention from emotional processing by producing neutral thoughts that are independent from and not in conflict with emotional information [51]) is usually preferred [46].”

“…as focused attention (FA), which involve disengaging attention from the emotional information before it is represented in working memory by focusing on neutral thoughts or details Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 3 March 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 585536 (Van Dillen and Koole, 2007).”

“Interestingly, neuroimaging 298 COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2013, 27 (2) research suggests a neural mechanism for such effects (Van Dillen et al., 2009), whereby high load processing ‘‘tunes down’’ or down-regulates activity in affective neural circuitry when emotional stimuli are present.”

“In addition, increasing working memory demands have been found to reduce negative mood in response to negative images (Van Dillen and Koole 2007).”

“E-mail: smnhbabaei3@gmail.com Received: March 15, 2015 Accepted: April 13, 2015 Online Published: June 11, 2015 doi:10.5539/gjhs.v8n2p117 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/gjhs.v8n2p117”

“…no matter their relevancy to ongoing cognition, have intrinsic saliency and potential to disrupt cognition by automatically absorbing limited WM resources (Erber & Tesser, 1992; Erthal et al., 2005; Mano et al., 2012; Pessoa et al., 2002; Van Dillen & Koole, 2007, 2009; Van Dillen et al., 2009).”

“These meanings are more representative of refocusing (Garnefski et al., 2017) or distraction (Gross, 2015; Van Dillen & Koole, 2007), rather than reappraisal.”

“A distracting task is effective not simply because it causes us to turn away from negative feelings, but because it also requires attention to something else (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“…shifting of attention away from negative emotions and toward positive or neutral stimuli to prevent them from returning to the negative emotions (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007). maladaptive ERS Suppression Suppression refers to the behavior of an individual to suppress the expression of an emotion…”

“This hypothesis has received strong empirical support that negative stimuli generally hold more attention than neutral or positive stimuli, even for mood-congruent cognitions (Van Dillen & Koole 2007).”

“Thus, it is suggested that risk factors (e.g., parental depression, genetic vulnerabilities) associated with developing emotional problems and mood disorders may work through the ability to execute control over emotional input and to adaptively distract oneself from negative stimuli (Joorman et al., 2007; Landrø et al…”

“Although distraction has a negative reputation, distraction is a relatively effective way to reduce negative emotions in response to distressing stimuli (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007) or among people in depressed moods (Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1993).”

“If too many cognitive resources are consumed, the cognitive load will be larger (Barrett et al., 2007; Van Dillen and Koole, 2007).”

“Following the emotional rating, participants completed a math test consisting of twenty questions to distract from their previous emotional experience [21], [22].”

“Distraction is an ER strategy that involves disengaging from an emotional stimulus by diverting one ’ s attention away from the emotional stimulus, in order to reduce the intensity of the emotional response (van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“Awareness of what causes changes in current mood is presumably low and updating is not likely to impose a substantial memory load (Van Dillen and Koole, 2007; Mikels et al., 2008).”

“In a wide-ranging review of goal constructs, Austin and Vancouver (1996, p. 345) noted that ‘Goals at lower levels of abstraction… are invariably short term, whereas goals at higher levels must be longer term’.”

“…memory and impede mood-congruent processing, which in turn facilitates the shifting of attention away from negative emotions (Forkosh & Drake, 2017; Van Dillen & Koole, 2007) According to the psychoanalytic school’s theory, expressingemotionscanreleaseimprisonedenergy,andsotheventing…”

“Although many studies show that tasks that are cognitively more demanding are more useful in reducing negative emotions compared to simple tasks (Bowman & Tamborini, 2012; Van Dillen & Koole, 2007), we did not confirm these results.”

“Focusing on the task itself is not just problem-focused type of coping (see Folkmann & Lazarus, 1988) because the overload of working memory with demands of the task also dampens the intensity of emotions (van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“These observations by Margaret support Van Dillen and Koole’s (2007) findings that cognitively demanding tasks that load the working memory can prevent the brain from “mood-congruent processing” (p. 715) and thereby can serve to distract a person from negative mood.”

“Van Dillen and Koole (2007) suggested that drawing could be considered a complex or cognitively demanding task similar to math problems.”

“In contrast, Van Dillen and colleagues found that as the cognitive loads of WM tasks increased, the intensity of self-reported negative emotional responses decreased (Van Dillen et al., 2009; Van Dillen and Koole, 2007).”

“Based on the above fi ndings on distraction, we formulated the basic assumption of our working memory account that task-related and affective information competes over working memory resources because working memory capacity is limited (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“Working memory’s preoccupation with the task may itself serve as a distractor from aversive stimuli, causing the neutralization of emotional experience (van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“Given that sustained attention to the task at hand may relieve individuals from negative affective states (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007), it is equally likely that an exposure to unrealistically high beauty standards results in a greater maintenance of inhibitory control in the Stroop task…”

“Based on Van Dillen and Koole (42) working memory distraction model, the authors hypothesised that the cognitive demands involved in humour processing, particularly incongruity resolution, may reduce negative emotions more effectively than equally positive but non-humorous stimuli.”

“Preoccupation of working memory is thus achieved, which diverts attention from the experience of negative emotion or negatively saturated stimuli [23].”

“51 Therefore, it could be possible that patients with low working memory engage in NSSI as they fail to distract themselves from the emotion-provoking stimuli.”

“Specific working memory deficits may exist in groups that self-injure because of a difficulty using cognitively demanding tasks to distract from a negative mood for emotional regulation (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“This explanation is supported by evidence suggesting that high task demands lessen the effects of affective states on cognitive performance (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007).”

“Moreover, loading working memory can prevent mood-congruent processing, helping to distract from negative emotions 42 .”

“Several studies on emotions reported attenuated self-reported negative or positive affects after distraction and reappraisal [17,20,21].”

“According to the Working Memory Model of Distraction (Van Dillen & Koole, 2007), a cognitively demanding task can disrupt the experience of negative emotion.”