Date of Award

7-1-1993

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

Abstract

Matthews and Antes (1992) tested the hypothesis that dysphoric people possess a negative attentional bias while the nondysphoric possess a positive attentional bias. They found that both dysphoric and nondysphoric subjects fixated regions of dual-mood pictorial stimuli rated happy more often, longer, and sooner than regions of the stimuli rated sad. It was also found that the dysphoric fixated sad regions more often than did the nondysphoric. The present study was an attempt to replicate and extend these findings by employing the Velten Mood Induction Procedure to induce sad, elated, and neutral mood in dysphoric and nondysphoric subjects. It was expected that induced mood would increase the strength of visual attentional effects by activating the affect-specific schemata of subjects.Results showed that the mood induction procedure was effective and had an impact on visual attention. In general it was found that the effects of dysphoria category were stronger than the effects of mood induction. Specific findings included: (1) subjects fixated happy areas of human pictures significantly more often, longer, and sooner than sad areas of human pictures while subjects fixated sad areas of landscape slides more often, longer, and sooner than happy areas of landscape slides, (2) during the last ten fixations the dysphoric fixated sad areas significantly longer than the nondysphoric while the nondysphoric tended to look at happy areas longer than the dysphoric, (3) subjects tended to fixate mood incongruent areas sooner than congruent mood areas, (4) induction of contrary mood produced significantly higher fixation frequencies, especially among female dysphoric subjects receiving elated induction.These findings were interpreted as strong evidence of an overall positive attentional bias to attend to happy human themes, strong evidence of a bias among the dysphoric to attend to sad themes over time, weak evidence of a bias among the nondysphoric to attend to happy themes over time, weak evidence for a perceptual defense mechanism which detects contrary mood themes early in order better to avoid them over time, and evidence that contrary mood induction activates contrary mood schemata resulting in greater information seeking behavior.

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