Flexibilidad atencional y factores motivacionales de auto-regulaciónEstudio de dinámicas de resiliencia al estrés y factores de protección contra la depresión y la ansiedad

Abstract

Attention is conceptualized as one of the most important cognitive processes when it comes to understanding emotional functioning in the face of stress. Selective attention does not only serve as a filter of environmental information, but it also allows selecting relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information. Therefore, the environment and motivation play an essential role to understand how selective attention works, highlighting a dynamic component of attention as a function of contextual and motivational features, in contrast to the stable conceptualization that has prevailed in recent decades. This raises the possibility that these motivational and contextual processes modulated attention towards the fulfillment of specific goals. Based on this proposal, in this Thesis it was studied whether attention can be modulated by the predominant activation of different motivational self-focuses focused on the search for positive results and/or on the avoidance of negative results, thus modifying attentional patterns depending of specifically active goals. These flexible attention processes would have a role in the regulation of stress, giving rise to the fact that they influence individuals' emotional functioning. Furthermore, operatizing this cognitive process of selective attention from a dynamic perspective (e.g., attentional flexibility) implies that it can be trained in order to generate benefits in psychological functioning...