Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Pratte, Michael

Committee Member

McKinney, Cliff

Committee Member

Winer, E.

Committee Member

Berman, Mitchell

Committee Member

Stafford, Ty

Date of Degree

8-7-2025

Original embargo terms

Visible MSU Only 1 year

Document Type

Dissertation - Campus Access Only

Major

Clinical Psychology

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Psychology

Abstract

A central goal in contemporary clinical science is to measure emotionally driven factors of psychopathology through cognitive experimental methods. However, limitations in previous experimental paradigms have led to a lack of sensitivity and reliability in measuring the biased processing of positive and negative information. Additionally, these biases have not been investigated in individuals who fear happiness. Therefore, this study examined the unique relations between attention and memory biases of emotional stimuli and fear of happiness scores. A more sensitive experimental paradigm tracked eye positions while participants viewed faces over time to measure tendencies to attend to emotional content. A memory task for the viewed faces was also employed to measure biases in the recall of positive and negative faces. There were no overall average differences in attentional biases or memory performance between those low and high in fear of happiness. Both groups displayed quick, automatic attention biases toward all emotional faces, which emerged earlier than identified in past studies. Time course analyses showed that whereas the attentional bias toward happiness sustained in the low fear of happiness group, this positivity bias disappeared after a few seconds in the high fear of happiness group. Additionally, the bias toward sadness reversed into a bias to view neutral faces in the high fear of happiness group. These findings provide evidence of an overall valence or saliency bias, in which all emotional expressions quickly capture initial attention allocation. Additionally, those who fear happiness may avoid positive information after initial appraisal, experience emotional insensitivity, or even fear all emotional experiences that emerge over time.

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