Floating and Zooming

It's a feature that over-fires. Anxiety evolved for real threats. It pulls attention to the problem and narrows perspective so you can work on a resolution. Like many automatic systems, it gets triggered by things that aren't tigers, and then you're tunnel-visioned on an email. (/anxiety)

Arousal shrinks the range of cues you use. Easterbrook reviewed the arousal literature and proposed that as emotional arousal rises, the range of cues a person takes in shrinks. Dropping irrelevant cues can help at first. Past a point, relevant cues go too, and performance falls. (Easterbrook, 1959, Psychological Review)

Weapon focus. In an eye-tracking study, people watching a scene with a gun looked at the gun more often and for longer, and were worse at recognizing the person holding it. A meta-analysis found a small but reliable effect on lineup accuracy and a larger one on describing the person. Part of the effect comes from the object being unusual, so threat isn't the only driver. (Loftus, Loftus & Messo, 1987, Law and Human Behavior; Steblay, 1992, meta-analysis; Pickel, 1998, Memory)

The time collapse is an inference, not a finding. The studies above measure narrowing in space: what you look at and what you remember seeing. The idea that pain also shrinks your sense of time, so the past and future drop out of view, is this page's extension of that, plus everyday experience. Treat it as a hypothesis.

Positive emotion tends to widen attention. Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory says positive emotions widen the range of thoughts and actions that come to mind. In one test, people shown amusing or calming film clips were more likely to match shapes by their overall pattern than by their small details. (Fredrickson, 2001, American Psychologist; Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005, Cognition and Emotion)

Intensity matters more than good vs. bad. Strong wanting narrows attention too: positive feelings high in approach motivation (desire, craving) narrowed attention in lab tasks. So the dial is closer to "how strongly gripped" than "how happy." (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2008, Psychological Science)

Widening the room comes from ACT. For chronic pain, Harris recommends broad focus: acknowledge the pain, then widen to the five senses, the room and what you're doing. That's the room part of the walkthrough. The pain doesn't go anywhere; the struggle with it eases because it's no longer the only thing in view. (ACT Made Simple, ch. 17)

Widening across time is self-as-context. ACT's name for the part of you that notices. Harris's Continuous You exercise walks back through your life: your body, roles and feelings have all changed, and the you who noticed things as a child is the same you noticing now. Seen from there, a bad hour is something that part of you watches, among everything else it has watched. (ACT Made Simple, ch. 25)

Honest gap: the lab studies show emotion and arousal change how wide attention is. They don't show that widening it on purpose reduces suffering. That part is clinical practice and experience, not the experiments cited here.