Biased processing of emotional information in sub-clinical anxiety: Evidence from Simon effects

Schrooten, Martien; Smulders, Fren T.Y.

doi:10.1016/j.paid.2009.05.030

Cited by 5 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Despite the fact that stimulus content as well as emotional stimulus position were irrelevant, undergraduates under physical stress (i.e., exposed to height) responded faster when response position corresponded to the position of physical-threat words (500 ms presentation of the words) than when not, whereas undergraduates tested in the lab responded faster when these positions did not correspond; for social-threat words the opposite pattern was observed. In a second study, high-and low-trait anxious undergraduates performed the task in a traditional lab-setting (Schrooten & Smulders, 2009). As expected, high-trait-anxious undergraduates responded faster when response and social-threat word spatially corresponded than when not (14 ms presentation); they showed the reverse response pattern for positive words.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 55%

“…Recently, we have outlined a different approach to understanding behavioural response tendencies to emotional stimuli that does not rely on the supposed valence of behavioural responses (Schrooten & Smulders, 2007, 2009. The novelty of this approach is its focus on the modulation of response tendencies due to their spatial (and not affective) correspondence to an emotional stimulus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is this different approach that is adopted in the present study to examine whether and how anxiety patients and healthy controls differ in behavioural response tendencies to emotional words. Such response modulations due to spatial correspondence between emotional stimulus and responsecalled spatial Simon effects for emotional stimulus content -have been recently examined with the following RT paradigm (Schrooten & Smulders, 2007, 2009. Stimulus pairs consisting of one emotional and one neutral word were visually presented, one after the other, with one word above the other and with both words printed in red or green.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent evidence from two independent studies indeed suggests that behavioural responses of anxious individuals depend on the spatial correspondence between the response and an emotionally relevant stimulus, even when the emotional stimulus is presented concurrently with another neutral stimulus (Schrooten & Smulders, 2007, 2009. In one of these studies (Schrooten & Smulders, 2007), undergraduates performed the RT task as described before while exposed to height (on a glass bridge) or in a traditional lab-setting (no physical stress).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Modulation of responses to emotional information in pathological anxiety

Schrooten

Smulders

Arntz

2011

Journal of Experimental Psychopathology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study demonstrates, for the first time, that in pathological anxiety, behavioural responses depend on spatial correspondence to emotional information. Anxious patients and healthy controls were presented with word pairs consisting of one emotional and one neutral word (one above the other) and were asked to respond to the print colour of each pair by pressing the upper or lower response key. Patients responded faster when the required response did spatially correspond with a threat-related or positive word than when not; controls showed no significant response modulation. Response patterns were similar with 14 ms and 500 ms word presentation. These results are taken to suggest that these anxious patients preferentially respond to threat-relevant and positive information and are impaired to counteract this early tendency.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Modulation of responses to emotional information in pathological anxiety

Schrooten

Smulders

Arntz

2011

Journal of Experimental Psychopathology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…During practice trials, 32 additional emotionally neutral unambiguous words (mean word length = 5.3; SD = 1.21; range 3–7 letters) were presented, taken from previous anxiety research (e.g. Schrooten and Smulders, , ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attention allocation to ambiguous health/somatic threat cues

Schrooten

Vancleef

2014

European Journal of Pain

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Low catastrophizers demonstrated attentional bias to threat content. Participants reporting higher catastrophizing showed overall enhanced attentional orienting. There was no evidence for differences in (biased) attention to unambiguous and ambiguous words. Further research is needed to determine attentional bias for ambiguous pain-/threat-related stimuli in the context of consistent attentional bias for unambiguous pain-/threat-related stimuli.

show abstract

Disentangling attention from action in the emotional spatial cueing task

Mulckhuyse

Crombez

2014

Cognition and Emotion

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the emotional spatial cueing task, a peripheral cue--either emotional or non-emotional--is presented before target onset. A stronger cue validity effect with an emotional relative to a non-emotional cue (i.e., more efficient responding to validly cued targets relative to invalidly cued targets) is taken as an indication of emotional modulation of attentional processes. However, results from previous emotional spatial cueing studies are not consistent. Some studies find an effect at the validly cued location (shorter reaction times compared to a non-emotional cue), whereas other studies find an effect at the invalidly cued location (longer reaction times compared to a non-emotional cue). In the current paper, we explore which parameters affect emotional modulation of the cue validity effect in the spatial cueing task. Results from five experiments in healthy volunteers led to the conclusion that a threatening spatial cue did not affect attention processes but rather indicate that motor processes are affected. A possible mechanism might be that a strong aversive cue stimulus decreases reaction times by means of stronger action preparation. Consequently, in case of a spatially congruent response with the peripheral cue, a stronger cue validity effect could be obtained due to stronger response priming. The implications for future research are discussed.

show abstract

Biased processing of emotional information in sub-clinical anxiety: Evidence from Simon effects

Cited by 5 publications

References 22 publications

Modulation of responses to emotional information in pathological anxiety

Modulation of responses to emotional information in pathological anxiety

Attention allocation to ambiguous health/somatic threat cues

Disentangling attention from action in the emotional spatial cueing task

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About