***TASK*** the task is to summarize an input biomedical literature in six sentences 
    ***INPUT*** the input is a biomedical literature 
    ***OUTPUT*** the output is the summary of an input biomedical literature in six sentences 
    ***DOCUMENTATION*** 
    ***EXAMPLES*** 
    Input: Freeman et al. demonstrated that detection sensitivity for a low contrast Gabor stimulus improved in the presence of flanking , collinearly oriented grating stimuli , but only when observers attended to them . By recording visual event-related potentials ( ERPs ) elicited by a Gabor stimulus , we investigated whether this context ual cueing effect involves changes in the short-latency afferent visual signal from V1 that have a stimulus onset latency between 60 and 80 ms and /or longer-latency changes from visual cortex . Under dual-task conditions , the subjects performed contrast discrimination for a central Gabor and an orientation judgment for a pre-specified subset of the flanking Gabors . On r and om trials , the central Gabor could be collinearly or orthogonally oriented with respect to the attended flankers . Subjects showed improvements in discriminating the contrast of the central grating when it was oriented collinearly with the attended flankers . The ERP difference between attending to collinear versus orthogonal flankers manifested as a positive polarity response at occipital electrodes with a latency of 180 - 250 ms after stimulus onset . No shorter-latency context ual cueing differences were observed in the ERPs . The ERP latency profile of the context ual cueing effect argues against the hypothesis that short-latency afferent activity from V1 is the stage of processing at which attention can influence neuronal lateral interactions . However , the scalp voltage distribution of the longer-latency context ual cueing effect is similar to the one generated by the early phasic stimulus onset activity from V1 . These findings leave open the possibility that V1 is involved in the attentional modulation of lateral interactions but that this has a longer time course , likely being mediated by re-afferent inputs from later stages of the visual pathway In 3 studies , the authors investigated the functional role of psychological resilience and positive emotions in the stress process . Studies 1a and 1b explored naturally occurring daily stressors . Study 2 examined data from a sample of recently bereaved widows . Across studies , multilevel r and om coefficient modeling analyses revealed that the occurrence of daily positive emotions serves to moderate stress reactivity and mediate stress recovery . Findings also indicated that differences in psychological resilience accounted for meaningful variation in daily emotional responses to stress . Higher levels of trait resilience predicted a weaker association between positive and negative emotions , particularly on days characterized by heightened stress . Finally , findings indicated that over time , the experience of positive emotions functions to assist high-resilient individuals in their ability to recover effectively from daily stress . Implication s for research into protective factors that serve to inhibit the scope , severity , and diffusion of daily stressors in later adulthood are discussed Objective : According to the attention network approach , attention is best understood in terms of three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct networks — alerting , orienting , and executive attention . An important question is whether the experience of emotion differentially influences the efficiency of these networks . Method : This study examines 180 participants were r and omly assigned to a happy , sad , or control condition  and undertook a modified version of the Attention Network Test . Results : The results showed no effect of happiness or sadness on alerting , orienting , or executive attention . However , sad participants showed reduced intrinsic alertness . Conclusion : This suggests that sadness reduces general alertness rather than impairing the efficiency of specific attention networks . ( J. of Att . Dis . 2010 ; 13(6 ) 629 - 639 The spatial distribution of visual attention was investigated by measuring target detectability ( d ' ) and event-related brain potentials ( ERPs ) to stimuli at varying distances from an attended locus . Vertical bars were flashed rapidly in r and om order to 1 of 3 locations : one in each of the lateral visual fields and one on the vertical meridian above the fixation point . Subjects maintained eye fixation while directing their attention to 1 of the 3 locations for the duration of each 1.75 min run . Their primary task was to detect infrequent , shorter target bars at the attended location . A secondary task was to respond to shorter target bars at either of the 2 unattended locations if they ' happened to notice them ' ( without trying to detect them ) . ERPs and d ' scores were obtained to the lateral field stimuli both when they were specifically attended ( primary task ) , as well as when attention was focused upon midline or opposite-field flashes ( secondary task ) . Both d ' scores and the amplitudes of the P135 and N190 waves decreased progressively as attention was directed to locations increasingly distant from a given lateral stimulus . These results support ' gradient ' models of the spatial distribution of visual attention Recent theory suggests that positive psychological processes integral to health may be energized through the self-reinforcing dynamics of an upward spiral to counter emotion dysregulation . The present study examined positive emotion – cognition interactions among individuals in partial remission from depression who had been r and omly assigned to treatment with mindfulness-based cognitive therapy ( MBCT ; n = 64 ) or a waitlist control condition ( n = 66 ) . We hypothesized that MBCT stimulates upward spirals by increasing positive affect and positive cognition . Experience sampling assessed changes in affect and cognition during 6 days before and after treatment , which were analyzed with a series of multilevel and autoregressive latent trajectory models . Findings suggest that MBCT was associated with significant increases in trait positive affect and momentary positive cognition , which were preserved through autoregressive and cross-lagged effects driven by global emotional tone . Findings suggest that daily positive affect and cognition are maintained by an upward spiral that might be promoted by mindfulness training Positive psychology has flourished in the last 5 years . The authors review recent developments in the field , including books , meetings , courses , and conferences . They also discuss the newly created classification of character strengths and virtues , a positive complement to the various editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( e. g. , American Psychiatric Association , 1994 ) , and present some cross-cultural findings that suggest a surprising ubiquity of strengths and virtues . Finally , the authors focus on psychological interventions that increase individual happiness . In a 6-group , r and om-assignment ,  placebo-controlled Internet study , the authors tested 5 purported happiness interventions and 1 plausible control exercise . They found that 3 of the interventions lastingly increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms . Positive interventions can supplement traditional interventions that relieve suffering and may someday be the practical legacy of positive psychology The broaden- and -build theory of positive emotions predicts that positive emotions broaden the scopes of attention and cognition , and , by consequence , initiate upward spirals toward increasing emotional well-being . The present study assessed this prediction by testing whether positive affect and broad-minded coping reciprocally and prospect ively predict one another . One hundred thirty-eight college students completed self-report measures of affect and coping  at two assessment periods 5 weeks apart . As hypothesized , regression analyses showed that initial positive affect , but not negative affect , predicted improved broad-minded coping , and initial broad-minded coping predicted increased positive affect , but not reductions in negative affect . Further mediational analyses showed that positive affect and broad-minded coping serially enhanced one another . These findings provide prospect i ve evidence to support the prediction that positive emotions initiate upward spirals toward enhanced emotional well-being . Implication s for clinical practice and health promotion are discussed The influence of mood states on the propensity to use heuristics as expressed in stereotypes was examined using signal detection statistics . Participants experienced happy , neutral , or sad moods and " remembered " whether names connoting race ( African American , European American ) belonged to social categories ( criminal , politician , basketball player ) . Positive mood increased reliance on heuristics , indexed by higher false identification of members of stereotyped groups . Positive mood lowered sensitivity ( d ' ) , even among relative experts , and shifted bias ( beta ) or criterion to be more lenient for stereotypical names . In contrast , sad mood did not disrupt sensitivity and , in fact , revealed the use of a stricter criterion compared with baseline mood . Results support theories that characterize happy mood as a mental state that predisposes reliance on heuristics and sad mood as dampening such reliance Emotional states are known to influence how people process relevant information . Here , we address the impact of emotional state on irrelevant information . In this experiment ,  participants were r and omly assigned to a neutral or positive mood induction , and then completed a task that involved viewing a sequence of overlapping pictures and words . They were instructed to attend to the pictures and ignore the distracting words . Following a filled interval , implicit memory for the distracting words was tested using a  word fragment completion task . Individuals in the positive mood group showed increased implicit memory for previously irrelevant information compared to those in the neutral mood group . These findings are consistent with the view that positive mood broadens attention to include encoding of irrelevant information in the environment , and this can impact subsequent performance Two studies tested the hypothesis that certain positive emotions speed recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotions . In Study 1 , 60 subjects ( Ss ) viewed an initial fear-eliciting film  , and were r and omly assigned to view a secondary film that elicited : ( a ) contentment ; ( b ) amusement ; ( c ) neutrality ; or ( d ) sadness . Compared to Ss who viewed the neutral and sad secondary films , those who viewed the positive films exhibited more rapid returns to pre-film levels of cardiovascular activation . In Study 2 , 72 Ss viewed a film known to elicit sadness . Fifty Ss spontaneously smiled at least once while viewing this film . Compared to Ss who did not smile , those who smiled exhibited more rapid returns to pre-film levels of cardiovascular activation . We discuss these findings in terms of emotion theory and possible health-promoting functions of positive emotions Research shows that positive mood can serve to broaden the scope of attention at both the perceptual and conceptual level ( e.g. , increasing the size of spatial attentional focus and semantic access to remote associates ) . We investigated whether this relaxation of attentional filters by positive affect reduces their selectivity for basic visual features . We induced positive , neutral , or negative affect  and asked observers to identify a target motion direction in a series of rapid r and  om moving dot displays . Using a reverse correlation method , we examined the differential effects of emotion on observers '  perceptual tuning curves for motion direction . Here we find that positive affect reduces selectivity for motion direction by broadening observers ' perceptual tuning relative to both neutral and negative affect conditions . These findings provide the first behavioral evidence that positive emotion influences selectivity for basic visual features through modulation of tuning properties We have used fMRI to examine the nature of the changes that occur in the human visual cortex when an observer attends to a particular location in the visual image . Previous studies have shown that the magnitude of the response to a visual stimulus is increased when the observer attends to the stimulus . We show that , in addition , attention to a particular location results in a widespread suppression of activity levels at all other locations . This suggests that a key mechanism of attentional modulation may be that spontaneous ( baseline ) levels of neural activity are adjusted in a position-dependent manner across the entire visual field Emotional experience in healthy men has been shown to rely on a brain network including subcortical as well as cortical areas in a complex interaction , which may be substantially influenced by many internal personal and external factors such as individuality , gender , stimulus material and task instructions . The divergent results may be interpreted by taking these considerations into account . Hence , many aspects remain to be clarified in characterizing the neural correlates underlying the subjective experience of emotion . One unresolved question refers to the influence of emotion quality on the cerebral substrates . Hence , 26 male healthy subjects were investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging during st and ardized sad and happy mood induction as well as a cognitive control task to explore brain responses differentially involved in positive and negative emotional experience . Sad and happy mood in contrast to the control task produced similarly significant activations in the amygdala-hippocampal area extending into the parahippocampal gyrus as well as in the prefrontal and temporal cortex , the anterior cingulate , and the precuneus . Significant valence differences emerged when comparing both tasks directly . More activation has been demonstrated in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex ( VLPFC ) , the anterior cingulate cortex ( ACC ) , the transverse temporal gyrus , and the superior temporal gyrus during sadness . Happiness , on the other h and , produced stronger activations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex ( DLPFC ) , the cingulate gyrus , the inferior temporal gyrus , and the cerebellum . Hence , negative and positive moods reveal distinct cortical activation foci within a common neural network , probably making the difference between qualitatively different emotional feelings Many previous studies have demonstrated that the visual N1 component is larger for attended-location stimuli than for unattended-location stimuli . This difference is observed typically only for tasks involving a discrimination of the attended-location stimuli , suggesting that the N1 wave reflects a discrimination process that is applied to the attended location . The present study tested this hypothesis by examining the N1 component elicited by attended stimuli under conditions that either required or did not require the subject to perform a discrimination . Specifically , the N1 elicited by foveal stimuli during choice-reaction time ( RT ) tasks was compared with the N1 elicited by identical stimuli during simple-RT tasks . In three experiments , a larger posterior N1 was observed in choice-RT tasks than in simple-RT tasks , even when several potential confounds were eliminated ( e.g. , arousal and motor preparation ) . This N1 discrimination effect was observed even when no motor response was required and was present for both color- and form-based discriminations . Moreover , this discrimination effect was equally large for easy and difficult discriminations , arguing against a simple re source -based explanation of the present results . Instead , the results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that the visual N1 component reflects the operation of a discrimination process within the focus of attention Attending a certain region in space enhances activity in visual areas retinotopically mapped to this region ; stimuli presented in this region are preferentially processed . The zoom lens model of visual attention proposes that the attended region can be adjusted in size and predict 
    Output:
    
While several studies reported a broadening of attention , others found that positive mood led to a more diffuse information processing style .
Positive mood appears to lessen attention selectivity in a way that is context -specific and bound to limitations .
This novel model is able to accommo date discrepant findings , seeks to translate the phenomenon of the so-called broadening of attention with positive mood into functional terms , and provides plausible neurobiological mechanisms underlying this effect , suggesting a crucial role of the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex in this interaction