MIFU EMO MX

Improved emotion management—in one week?

Before and after training, members of each group filled out questionnaires about their symptoms of depression and anxiety, and completed a number of computerized tasks to evaluate their emotion-processing skills.

Emotion processing was broken into three categories (intensity, memory, and attention bias). During the emotional-intensity task, students looked at 66 positive, negative, and neutral images one by one. After viewing each picture, they were asked to rate the strength of their emotional responses to it. In the emotional-memory task, students were presented with some of those same images, along with some new ones, and asked to recall which images they’d viewed previously.

In the attention bias task, participants were repeatedly presented with images of two faces. Each pair of faces contained either a happy, sad, or neutral person paired with another neutral face. Positioning of the neutral face varied from left to right. Face pairs were presented one at a time on the screen, then removed. Once the pictures disappeared, a dot appeared on either the left or right half of the screen, and students were asked to indicate which side the dot was on by pressing a key on a keyboard. Researchers assessed their accuracy and reaction time.