Attention to external threat cues in anxiety states

Not Quite Ready to Invest

“…For example, adults diagnosed with certain types of phobia display a bias for thematically related words on stroop tasks [Asmudsen & Stein, 1994]. Adult anxiety patients as well display a bias towards stimuli that have a negative affective valence associated with them [Logan, & Goetsch, 1993;Mathews, & MacLeod, 1985]. Similar patterns have been found in normative samples that vary in certain personality dimensions.…”

Alcohol abuse in individuals exposed to trauma: A critical review.

“…For example, Bryant and Harvey ( 1995 ) compared the performance of individuals involved in motor vehicle accidents with PTSD, simple phobia of driving, or low anxiety on an emotional Stroop color-naming paradigm. This paradigm is commonly used to assess degree of attentional bias for fear-related information in the emotional disorders (see reviews by Logan & Goetsch, 1993;Mathews & MacLeod, 1994;Segal, 1996;and J. M. G. Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1988). Participants were asked to name the color in which a variety of words were printed, as quickly as possible, while ignoring the meaning of the words.…”

Potential school violence: Relationship between teacher anxiety and warning-sign identification

“…Beck and Clark theorized that anxiety would lead to a propensity to attend to negative information. In fact, many researchers have reported attentional bias toward threatening information in high-anxiety individuals (Honk et al, 2001;Logan & Goetsch, 1993;Mogg et al, 2000). This attentional bias has been found to be particularly strong for ambiguous stimuli (Hock, Krohne, & Kaiser, 1996), as well as when multiple pieces of information are presented (MacLeod & Mathews, 1991).…”