How Do We Choose Where to Direct Attention When Emotions Run High?

When an emotion runs high, how do you choose where to direct your attention? It takes one kind of effort to turn your mind toward something neutral. It takes another to stay with what upset you long enough to ask whether you understood it correctly. Both are ways of regulating emotion. They ask different things of you, and they leave you with different work to do afterward.

Wednesday · Red · Emotions and regulation

What can attention change?

A trigger is a cue that sets an emotional response in motion. A sound, a remembered loss, or a few words can draw attention before you have decided what they mean. Emotion regulation is the process of influencing how an emotion unfolds, how you experience it, or how you express it. One part of that skill is choosing what to attend to while you still have a decision to make.

In research on emotion, distraction can mean deliberately holding an unrelated thought in mind, even while your eyes stay on the thing that upset you. Reappraisal means considering another interpretation that could change the emotional meaning of what you see. To reconsider a judgment about someone’s intent, you first have to hold that judgment in mind. To direct attention elsewhere, you can leave the question of intent open. That difference helped researchers frame a surprisingly simple experiment.

What did people choose as intensity rose?

In a 2011 study, Gal Sheppes and colleagues trained twenty participants to use both strategies. On each trial, the participants saw an unpleasant photograph for half a second, pressed a button to choose a strategy, then used it while viewing the same picture for five seconds. Half the pictures had been rated lower in emotional intensity and half higher. Everyone faced the same choice on each trial. Sheppes and colleagues, Emotion-Regulation Choice.

With lower-intensity pictures, participants chose distraction about one time in four. With higher-intensity pictures, they chose it about seven times in ten. Eighteen of the twenty shifted their choices in that direction. The question the experiment answered was which strategy people preferred when they had two options. It left open which choice would help a particular person keep a promise, face a painful fact, or speak kindly.

What changed in the brain, and what did people feel?

Kateri McRae and colleagues asked eighteen women to view pictures in a functional MRI scanner. On some trials they held six letters in memory, directing attention toward the letters while the picture remained visible. On others they reinterpreted what the picture showed, or simply viewed it. The researchers could then compare two kinds of evidence from the same experiment: what participants reported feeling and changes in a blood-oxygen signal associated with brain activity. McRae and colleagues, The Neural Bases of Distraction and Reappraisal.

Both strategies reduced reported distress compared with simply viewing the unpleasant pictures. Reinterpretation produced the larger reduction in felt distress. Holding the letters in mind, however, produced the larger decrease in the signal from the amygdala, a brain region involved in processing emotionally significant information. A person listening to the participants’ reports would learn something the scan alone could not tell them. And this was a small study with a particular memory task. It gives us little basis for deciding how any one person ought to respond to grief or anger.

What happens when attention returns?

Ravi Thiruchselvam and colleagues added a second viewing. Eighteen students contributed usable recordings from scalp electrodes while they distracted themselves, reinterpreted pictures, or simply watched. The researchers tracked a sustained electrical response called the late positive potential, which is sensitive to the attention people give emotionally significant pictures. During the first viewing, distraction reduced this signal earlier than reinterpretation did. Thiruchselvam and colleagues, The Temporal Dynamics of Emotion Regulation.

Thirty minutes later, the students saw the pictures again with instructions simply to watch. The average electrical response was larger for pictures they had previously distracted themselves from than for pictures they had simply watched both times. Their ratings of how unpleasant or arousing the pictures felt showed no corresponding difference. A stronger electrical response on seeing a photograph again is a much narrower finding than a prediction about how anyone will feel when they return to a difficult conversation.

What is a renewed mind free to do?

Ephesians 4:23 speaks of being “renewed in the spirit of your minds” (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, used throughout). The letter addresses people learning a shared way of life in Christ. Read on and the language gets wonderfully specific. Tell your neighbor the truth. Take care with anger. Choose words that give the hearer what they need. Someone can still feel the heat of anger and have a real choice about the next sentence. A pause can serve the person who will have to hear it. Ephesians 4:20–32.

Where does that freedom begin? Paul’s appeal in Romans 12 begins with God’s mercies. He asks believers to offer their bodies to God and describes renewal of the mind as opening the way to discern what is good. Titus 3:5 likewise locates renewal in the Holy Spirit and traces salvation to God’s mercy. A Christian who returns to the same grief morning after morning can begin each morning from that mercy. There is nothing to earn by feeling better on schedule. Romans 12:1–2 and Titus 3:3–8.

In 2 Timothy 1:7, power appears alongside love and self-discipline. Timothy is being urged to rekindle his gift and stand by a prisoner who may bring him public shame. Courage has an object here: a suffering person to stand beside and a testimony to give. Fear can accompany either act. Anxiety, trauma symptoms, and neurological illness give no one grounds to judge the strength of another person’s faith. The question this letter puts to a community is whom it will stand beside when doing so costs something. 2 Timothy 1:5–14.

A practice for the next decision

Choose one recent moment you can revisit comfortably. Write down what caught your attention. In a second sentence, record the meaning you gave it. Read the two sentences aloud. Which words describe what you could observe? Which words make a claim about a motive, an outcome, or your own worth?

If you can consider another reading honestly, write it down and name one fact that would help you weigh it. If the feeling takes up all your attention, put the page down and give your mind one neutral task, such as counting the corners of the objects in view. Choose when you will return to the page. On returning, ask what still deserves a response. The answer might be a question to ask, an apology to make, or a boundary to keep.

Merciful God, you know what stirred in me and what I still do not understand. By your Spirit, give me patience to leave an uncertain judgment open. When it is time to speak, help me tell the truth and give thought to the person who will hear me. Amen.