0.4 Attention and thought control

How does the attention process work? Do people who are anxious pay more attention to threatening things in their environment than peoplewho aren't anxious? Do people who are depressed have less motivation and a slower reaction time or do they pay more attention to negativestimuli than positive? There is going to be emotional biases with mental illnesses or each time someone pays attention to something - ifsomeone is experiencing an emotion, than that emotion is going to influence their attention in a certain way. For instance, if someoneis experiencing the emotion of 'guilt' then clearly if they see something they feel guilty about they are going to pay attention to itdifferently (as they would associate and compare the guilt they are feeling with the guilt related to the object they are looking at).

Attention also relates to the thoughts someone experiences - if someone is paying attention to their own thoughts, then they might dothings to control their thoughts. Some thoughts are voluntary and people direct or create them consciously, and some are moreunconscious and instinctual - thoughts that they have less control over. Wells and Morrison (1994) Wells, A., + Morrison, T. (1994) Qualitative dimensions of normal worry andnormal intrusive thoughts" A comparative study. Behavior Research and therapy. investigated dimensions of naturally occurring worry and intrusivethoughts in 30 normal subjects. They were asked to keep a diary and record their worries and intrusive thoughts, and they were also askedto rate each thought on the following dimensions:

1. Degree of verbal thought/imagery involved
2. Intrusiveness
3. How realistic the thought was
4. How involuntary the thought was
5. How controllable it was
6. How dismissable it was
7. How much the thought grabbed attention
8. Degree of distress associated with the thought
9. Intensity of compulsion to act on the thought
10. Degree of resistance to the thought
11. Degree of success in controlling the thought

Wells and Davies (1994) Wells, A., + Davies, M. (1994) A questionaire for assessing thought controlstrategies: Development and preliminary validation. have attempted to distinguish types of thought control strategy. Theyinterviewed patients with a range of anxiety disorders to determine the types of strategy used to control unpleasant and/or unwantedthoughts. Seven types of strategy emerged from the pilot interviews: cognitive and behavioral distraction; punishment; distancing; re-appraisal; mood changing activites; exposure to the thought; worry about more trivial things. Sometimes people might think that theirthoughts are likely to come true, or that their worries are not controllable. "Cognitive and behavioral distraction" probably meansdistraction by your own internal thinking or distraction by you doing something - such as behaving in a certain way. "Punishment" would meanpunishing yourself for having a thought you didn't want, distancing would mean somehow separating yourself from the thought, and re-appraisal would mean thinking of the thought differently or assessing that thought in a different way.