Abwendens
Abwendens is a term used in discussions of attention and emotion to describe the deliberate redirection of focus away from a stimulus. The word derives from German ab- "away" and wenden "to turn," with the suffix -ens forming a nominal concept in English usage. In cognitive psychology, abwendens refers to processes or strategies that redirect attention or experiential processing away from a salient input, such as cognitive reappraisal, selective suppression, or the use of competing stimuli. The phenomenon is often distinguished from general distraction by its intentional and evaluative character, and from avoidance by its emphasis on immediate control of perceptual or attentional resources. Empirical work on abwendens has employed tasks that measure attention with reaction times, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging to examine how goals, context, and affect influence the redirection of processing.
Theoretical accounts situate abwendens within executive control and the frontoparietal network, though there is no consensus