Linking A nxiety, Emotion, and Mindfulness 23
dreadful situation, instead of simply enduring the situation,
can lead to an entirely different emotional experience.
Even if there are no ways to change what’s happening,
you can still alter your experience of the situation by the way
in which you use your attention. Directing your focus either
away or toward certain features of your current environment
enables you to magnify or subdue the intensity of an emotion.
Imagine that you are out shopping with your mother and she
says something that embarrasses you in front of a clerk. By
distracting yourself or moving your attention away from the
comments and the clerk ’s reaction, you can limit the extent
to which you experience shame or embarrassment. Moreover,
you can use cognitive appraisals, or the way in which you
think about or assess a situation, to alter your perception of
the event and the significance of the emotion. For instance,
instead of construing your mother’s sensitive comments as
anxiety- provoking and humiliating, you might think about
the fact that you will likely never see this clerk again. It might
not matter very much what he thinks about you, seeing as
his opinion won’t affect you in the future.
The last process is response modulation. Response modu-
lation refers to direct attempts to inf luence the action ten-
dency produced by the emotion. These attempts can be
physical, mental, or behavioral. High levels of anxiety can
motivate you to minimize your exposure to a feared situa-
tion or person as much as possible. To take the scary boss
scenario, if you couldn’t avoid an encounter with your fright-
ening boss, your anxiety might compel you to try to keep the
conversation short and remove yourself from his presence
quickly. The way in which you responded to this avoidance
action tendency could inf luence your overall emotional
experience. One option would be to accept your anxiety and