Continuing the discussion on emotion regulation we come to attentional deployment. This is to changing one’s attention in order to impact the quality or intensity of our emotion. This is an especially common tactic in our efforts in self-distraction. We all have some experience with moving our attention to something easy to avoid confronting important and difficult thoughts and emotions. Watching television, playing games, surfing the web all have some role to play in moving attention away from emotions that we do not want to have. That is not to say that distraction is the only role of entertainment; however, there is an entire industry that devotes itself to producing entertainment that seems to do a very good job of distracting people from their current emotions and troubles that they would rather not deal with. Distraction as a strategy for emotion regulation is a fascinating discussion, but it will be put off so that we can discuss the counterpart of distraction. We can also use attentional deployment to further arouse emotions and motivate ourselves to act.
Attentional deployment as a strategy for emotion regulation means that upon the experience of an emotion, one wishes to alter it by bringing attention to the emotion (rumination) or something else (distraction). Distraction seems like an obvious method to reduce an emotion, but it is not obvious when we further pay attention to emotional things in order to fully arouse the emotion. Attention seems to be the natural mode of being and have little to do with emotion regulation. When we think about or pay attention to something, we are merely doing what we always do. It is not obvious where usual attention is being used as a way of regulating emotion.
In this discussion of attentional deployment, we come across a rather mysterious aspect of our psychological lives: rumination on negative thoughts. Perhaps one of the most common maladies of modern people is that they suffer from their own tormenting thoughts. We ruminate on anger, we self-shame, we fantasize about doing things we know would be bad for us to do. The mysterious places that we put our attention actually can be better understood when we look at the activity of attentional deployment as a method of emotion regulation.
Attention and Its Use in Emotion Regulation
To discuss this issue, we need to have a cursory idea of what role attention plays in our lives. It is so central to our experience that it is difficult to define. It is a hugely multifaceted concept and deserves much contemplation, but to be brief, we can first ask what is it that draws attention and why. From there, the ability to use attention to regulate emotion follows.
Obviously, what is important is what draws our attention. But it is not as simple as that, because whatever it is, also has to be unpredictable or complex. There are many things which we do not pay attention to that are vital for our lives, but they are so predictable that there is no need for our attention. Consciousness seems to be on the edge of the known and the unknown. We can unconsciously do the things we know very well, but we are also unconscious of things we know nothing of. Somewhere in between we have conscious attention allowing us to expand our world of knowledge.
We usually pay attention to emotional things as long as the elements of it that are unknown are important and have the potential to be better understood. We think about a bad mistake we made until we come to “know” it well enough to not make it again. This does not mean that we fully understand it, just that we’ve come to a good enough solution that can relieve our attention of the situation.
This period of time when we attend to something difficult is not comfortable, a moment of learning provokes anxiety and we confront the unknown, therefore there is plenty of time to distract yourself until you forget the problem that you had. The attention to the emotion can be shifted to diminish the emotion. Distraction seems to have a clear role in diminish emotions that have difficult solutions, but enhancing emotion with attention (or rumination) seems to not be so obvious in its mechanism.
A Different Mechanism for Rumination
When we talk about emotion regulation, we are talking about an effort to alter an emotion based on its valance regarding a self-goal or long-term goal. In this case we experience an emotion which does align with a self-goal. If the emotion is weak enough it remains merely a momentary thought, but the objective of emotion regulation is to enhance that emotion to initiate actions that correspond to the self-goal. The weak emotion, which conforms to a self-goal, then draws further attention through emotion regulation to enhance itself and motivate action.
But how do we bring attention to these thoughts to enhance them? Often rumination is repetitive thinking which exists only as known, boring material. For us to hold attention on these emotions we must project the unknown possibilities onto these simple emotions. We must fantasize about the possibilities that bringing this emotion to action will bring.
We ask ourselves, “how can I make this emotion full of potential interest so that I can continue thinking about it.” This rumination then becomes akin to fantasy in an effort to maintain attention to it. We can think about this in terms of rumination which has negative connotation, but we can also think about it as the fantasy required to hold attention onto a fascinating subject that you may want to study at a high level. We repeat thoughts to arouse ourselves into pursuing these greater self-goals, but it is done by projecting infinite possibility into something previously banal.
Rumination and Savoring
When we ruminate about the hatred or disgust that we have for someone or something, often we are responding to a weak emotion by upregulating it to then act to accomplish a goal that relates to how one sees oneself or how one wants to be seen. To work ourselves up to this desire for action, we maintain attention on an emotion that is otherwise uninteresting at the moment (for you are not in the emotional situation to find actual interest in it). We then fantasize about how that person must be feeling so high and mighty after insulting you or bossing you around. We have very little basis for those thoughts because we know very little about this person, and what we do know is merely a persona of who they really are. Holding attention on such an emotion requires one to project and turn this person evil.
On the other hand, going deeper into some emotion can be positive. As mentioned earlier, curiosity in an abstract subject is highly dependent on creative fantasy. If one desires to do something which requires a depth of knowledge of a certain subject, it is necessary that he or she force themselves into savoring the subject and fantasizing about the possibilities of looking deeper. An aspiring physicist will see a bouncing ball with far more interest than the everyday person. He or she may project into that phenomenon an infinite depth of discovery that promises some great potential reward. In the same way that rumination perpetuates frustration to get us to act in alignment with a self-goal, fantasizing about a subject’s potential can help upregulate one’s wonder and enthusiasm for learning. This is also the case with other creative arts or craftmanship. Admiring paintings, music, film, dance, wine, foods, architecture, or conversation also require a projection of greater possibility into what may seem simple on the surface.
So What?
The constant thinking and overthinking in a society is a result of being emotional creatures in a world where amotivation and leisure is more than possible—it is encouraged. Distraction is very easy with all the available forms of entertainment, but sometimes, when lying in bed, it is focus on an emotional event that drives one’s thoughts.
All rumination and fantasy that enhances emotion serves a sort of self-goal about how you perceive yourself and how you want to be perceived. We think self-deprecating thoughts because we do not want to be viewed as a threat to more powerful people. The goal of self-security enhances the emotion of shame. We can fantasize about a sexual encounter to work up the courage to ask someone out. The goal of having a partner is worked towards by fantasy, and hopefully not a totally unrealistic one. We can ruminate about the anxiety we have for an upcoming speech. We focus on this because something may occur that we have not predicted that will embarrass us completely. We project the possible outcomes to either work up the courage, or to decide to not show up.
There is no question our lives are highly influenced by our attentional deployment to up regulate some of our emotion. This is done by the projection of fantasy onto what is yet to be known about that emotional or motivational situation. The role of fantasy in deployment of attention as a method of emotion regulation is unmistakable but underappreciated.
