distraction is often used as a coping mechanism for short-term emotion regulation. when presented with an unpleasant reality, humans often choose to occupy their attention with some other reality in order to remain in a positive mental state. this is referred to as ‘procrastination’ when the unpleasant reality is in the form of work. the natural human inclination to distract oneself was put to the test when the department of psychology at humboldt-universität zu berlin (humboldt university of berlin) held an experiment to study distraction. the goal of the experiment was to examine whether the effects of distraction on where subjects held their attention during repeated picture processing is changed by regular emotional functions. furthermore, they hypothesized that while distraction assists in short-term emotional regulation, it is actually harmful in the long term. in order to do so, the experimenters had subjects view 15 unpleasant pictures (set a) and “attend” to them (meaning the subjects were asked to pay full attention to the pictures). next, the subjects were shown 15 unpleasant pictures (set b) and were asked to distract themselves from the pictures (meaning they were to think about anything other than the picture on the screen; their example was to think about “the way to the supermarket”). finally, the subjects were shown 15 neutral pictures (set c) and were asked to attend to them. after 10 minutes of rest, the subjects entered the “re-exposure phase”, which repeated the experiment- this time requiring the subjects to pay attention to all of the sets, including set b. this experiment was performed on 3 separate blocks of participants. to examine the state of the subjects’ brain, the subject was to wear “ag/agcl-electrodes from 61 head sites using an easycap electrode system with an equidistant electrode montage. additional external electrodes were placed below the left (io1) and right eye (io2), below t1 (ground), on the nasion, and on the neck.” the subjects were also asked to rate the unpleasantness of the picture on the screen on a scale of 1-9. to test whether distraction in the first phase resulted in increased responsiveness during the re-exposure phase, experimenters “compared mean unpleasantness ratings between unpleasant pictures that were previously presented in the attend (previous attention) versus distract (previous distraction) condition using a paired t-test”. the end results of the experiment were as such: