Abstract: Driven by positive psychology, existing studies have shown that positive mood can not only broaden the scope of space and temporal attention and increase attention flexibility, but also bias people’s attention in positive mood towards positive stimuli. Previous studies interpreted the phenomenon of positive mood effect on attention based on such theories as broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and affect as information. However, these theories mainly emphasized the prime effect of mood on attention and the modulation effect on attention resource distribution, and therefore its specific mechanisms underlying them is unclear. The studies of neural biochemical mechanism showed that the effect of positive mood on attention is associated with the modulation of dopaminergic system on attention control and of positive mood on the activation of primary visual cortex. Future directions of studying the modulation effect of positive mood on attention should be based on different attention theory models and different kinds of attention selection.

Key words: positive mood, attention scope, attention flexibility, attention bias, dopaminergic system