Rational
The founder of emotional therapy Albert Ellis once said:
"What triggers our emotions and behaviors is not the trigger event itself, but our perception and attitude towards the trigger event." We always over-interpret events negatively interpret and even catastrophize them, which is the culprit that causes our negative emotions. Psychological scholar Bar-Haim and his team proposed the cognitive theory of for anxiety based on previous cognitive models. According to this theory, people with anxiety and depression have negative attention bias (negative attention bias). Attentional bias refers to the tendency to selectively distribute attention to positive or negative information during information processing (Karin. Mogg Bradley, 2016).
The brain has very limited information processing every moment. In order to survive and develop, humans are born to pay priority to negative information in their surrounding environment. Negative news often spreads faster, such as the folk saying "Good things don't go out, bad things spread thousands of miles." In a relatively comfortable environment, we always pay more attention to keywords such as "dynamic, change, danger, and problems", and selectively ignore "static, peaceful, and beautiful" in life. This is about negative attention bias.
Negative attention bias and anxiety
Cognitive theory shows that the tendency to focus on negative things, namely negative attention bias, is also related to the development and maintenance of anxiety symptoms (Bar-Haim, Lamy, Pergamin, Bakermans-Kranenburg, van Ijzendoorn, 2007; Beck Clark, 1997). In clinical and non-clinical populations, studies clearly demonstrated the association between negative attention bias and anxiety; high anxiety individuals showed stronger negative attention bias than healthy anxiety individuals (Dong, De Beuckelaer, Yu, Zhou, 2017). And this relationship between negative attention bias and anxiety or depression is most likely to be bidirectional (Van Bockstaele et al., 2014). means that anxiety symptoms can make us have too high attention to negative things, and negative attention bias can also lead to higher anxiety (Liu, Shen, Li, 2019). Higher levels of negative attention bias can keep anxiety at a higher level for a long time (Ho, 2018). Over-focusing on negative things will make us lose our ability to perceive good things and have many bad effects. First, it will make us feel inferior. Secondly, in interpersonal communication, we will gradually ignore the other person's strengths and become a "slut" who loves to be picky. Finally, we pay too much attention to negative social news, especially in the post-epidemic era, which will even cause us to have mass post-traumatic stress disorder . So, how do we deal with this negative attention bias? In the next issue, we will talk about how to use positive attention deviations to consciously choose our good mood~
