Gaze-Fixation to Happy Faces Predicts Mood Repair After a Negative Mood Induction Alvaro Sanchez University of Ghent Carmelo Vazquez Complutense University of Madrid Diego Gomez University of Huelva Jutta Joormann Northwestern University The present study tested the interplay between mood and attentional deployment by examining attention to positive (i.e., happy faces) and negative (i.e., angry and sad faces) stimuli in response to experimental inductions of sad and happy mood. Participants underwent a negative, neutral, or positive mood induction procedure (MIP) which was followed by an assessment of their attentional deployment to emotional faces using eye-tracking technology. In the positive MIP condition, analyses revealed a mood-congruent relation between positive mood and greater attentional deployment to happy faces. In the negative MIP condition, however, analyses revealed a mood-incongruent relation between increased negative mood and greater attentional deployment to happy faces. Furthermore, attentional deployment to happy faces after the negative MIP predicted participants’ mood recovery at the end of the experimental session. These results suggest that attentional processing of positive information may play a role in mood repair, which may have important clinical implications. Keywords: cognitive biases, selective attention, emotional processing, mood regulation, mood repair The interplay between mood and cognition is a crucial aspect of adaptation to our physical and interpersonal environments. Mood- cognition frameworks (Beck, 1967; Bower, 1987) emphasize that mood states result in the preferential processing of mood- congruent information. Thus, sad mood increases negative cogni- tions about the self, the world and/or the future, and thereby generates sustained negative affect (Beck, 1967). For most people, however, sad mood states tend to be transient and recovery typi- cally occurs quickly. Recent research has started to examine how cognitive processes are linked to mood repair. Thus, whereas mood affects cognitive processes (Bower, 1981), cognition also plays a role in determining the quality and intensity of mood responses (Lazarus, 1999). Specifically, recent proposals argue that attentional deployment plays a critical role in mood and emotion regulation (Gross & Thompson, 2007; Koole, 2009). Attentional deployment is a cog- nitive process which filters relevant inputs to be processed and determines accessible information in memory (Chun & Turk- Browne, 2007). Salient sensory, emotional, and mental informa- tion is filtered and processed through attentional processes, which can be initiated either in automatic or controlled ways (Calvo & Nummenmaa, 2007). Thus, shifting of attention may be an impor- tant factor in determining how the organism perceives and inter- prets environmental information, and it may represent an early influence on goal-directed behavior. Studies investigating the interplay between mood and attention deployment have tested the mood-cognition frameworks hypoth- esis (Beck, 1967; Bower, 1987) by which mood should bias attentional processing to mood-congruent aspects of a situation. Tamir and Robinson (2007), for example, found that participants under an induction of positive mood showed a greater tendency to selectively attend to positive words than participants under neutral or negative mood inductions. However, evidence of a relation between induced mood and subsequent mood-congruent atten- tional processing is limited when testing the effects of induced sad mood states. Although one study found that participants under a sad mood induction showed a greater tendency to selectively attend to mood congruent information (Bradley, Mogg, & Lee, 1997), most studies have failed to replicate this finding (Chepenik, Cornew, & Farah, 2007; Gallardo, Baños, Belloch, & Rupierez, 1999; McCabe, Gotlib, & Martin, 2000). Ellenbogen, Schwartzman, Stewart, and Walker (2002) argued that, besides some methodological differences among studies, a Alvaro Sanchez, Department of Psychology, University of Ghent, Gh- ent, Belgium; Carmelo Vazquez, Department of Psychology, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Diego Gomez, Department of Psy- chology, University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain; Jutta Joormann, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University. This research was supported by Spanish Ministry of Education grants, AP2006-01895 to first author, and PSI2008-02889-E and PSI2009-13922 to second author. We thank Carmen Valiente, Gonzalo Hervas, Nuria Romero, and Maria Provencio for their collaboration and support in dif- ferent stages of the study. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Alvaro Sanchez Lopez, Department of Psychology, University of Ghent, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium. E-mail: alvaro.sanchezlopez@ ugent.be This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Emotion © 2013 American Psychological Association 2013, Vol. 13, No. 5, 000 1528-3542/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0034500 1 AQ: au AQ: 1 AQ: 2 tapraid5/emo-emo/emo-emo/emo00513/emo2866d13z xppws S=1 9/5/13 12:27 Art: 2012-1156 APA NLM