Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety?

Fox, Elaine; Russo, Riccardo; Bowles, Robert J.; Dutton, Kevin

doi:10.1037/0096-3445.130.4.681

Cited by 1,295 publications

(1,454 citation statements)

References 70 publications

(116 reference statements)

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“…This is consistent with the idea that involuntary attentional orienting toward cue-associated stimuli is an adaptive mechanism that allows the organism to rapidly orient its attentional resources toward the reward-related location, thereby increasing the possibility of obtaining rewards (Hickey et al, 2011). Nonetheless, this finding is different from several experiments investigating the role of initial orienting and difficulty of disengagement on the involuntary attentional orientation toward affectively negative relevant stimuli (e.g., Fox et al, 2001;Koster, Crombez, Verschuere, & De Houwer, 2004;Mogg, Holmes, Garner, & Bradley, 2008;Van Damme, Crombez, & Notebaert, 2008;Yiend & Mathews, 2001). These studies rather found more evidence for a difficulty of disengagement than for a rapid initial orienting.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

“…The spatial cuing task was adapted from other studies investigating attentional orienting toward emotional stimuli (e.g., Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton, 2001;Vogt, De Hower, Koster, Van Damme, & Crombez, 2008). Each trial began with a fixation cross presented randomly for between 250 and 750 ms in the center of the screen with a white background.…”

Section: Spatial Cuing Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

et al. 2014

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a b s t r a c tSome stimuli can orient attentional resources and access awareness even if they appear outside the focus of voluntary attention. Stimuli with low-level perceptual salience and stimuli with an emotional content can modulate attention independently of voluntary processes. In Experiment 1, we used a spatial cuing task to investigate whether stimuli that are controlled for their perceptual salience can modulate the rapid orienting of attention based exclusively on their affective relevance. Affective relevance was manipulated through a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm in which an arbitrary and affectively neutral perceptual stimulus was associated with a primary reward (i.e., a chocolate odor). Results revealed that, after conditioning, attentional resources were rapidly oriented toward the stimulus that was previously associated with the reward. In Experiment 2, we used the very same conditioning procedure, but we devaluated the reward after conditioning for half of the participants through a sensory-specific satiation procedure. Strikingly, when the reward was devaluated, attention was no longer oriented toward reward-associated stimuli. Our findings therefore suggest that reward associations rapidly modulate visual processing independently of both voluntary processing and the perceptual salience of the stimulus. This supports the notion that stimuli associated with primary rewards modulate rapid attention orienting on the basis of the affective relevance of the stimulus.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Section: Spatial Cuing Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

et al. 2014

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“…Literature on anxiety suggests that this inability to disengage from threat cues plays an important part in the maintenance of anxiety disorder (Fox et al, 2001); our findings suggest that this may also be the case for loneliness. For social anxiety, specifically, disengagement difficulties have been linked to rumination of negative social events, which encourages the activation of memories associated with negative social evaluation or negative social experiences (Buckner et al, 2010).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

Investigating Hypervigilance for Social Threat of Lonely Children

Qualter¹,

Rotenberg

Barrett³

et al. 2012

J Abnorm Child Psychol

102

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This series of studies is the first to examine hypervigilance for social threat among lonely children and the first to establish this link using eye-tracking technology. Hypervigilance for social threat was operationalised as hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion in a variation of the hostile attribution paradigm (Study 1), scores on the Children's RejectionSensitivity Questionnaire (Study 2), and visual attention to socially threatening stimuli (Study 3). The participants were 185 children (11 years -7 months to 12 years -6 months), 248 children (9 years -4 months to 11 years -8 months) and 147 children (8 years -10 months to 12 years -10 months) in the three studies, respectively. Regression analyses showed that, with depressive symptoms covaried, there were quadratic relations between loneliness and these different measures of hypervigilance to social threat. As hypothesized, only children in the upper range of loneliness demonstrated elevated hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion, higher scores on the rejection sensitivity questionnaire, and disengagement difficulties when viewing socially threatening stimuli. We found that very lonely children are hypersensitive to social threat.Key words: Loneliness; Children; Hypervigilance; Social Threat; Rejection; Hypersensitivity, Rejection-sensitivity; Eye movement; Attentional bias.Running Head: LONELINESS AND HYPERVIGILANCE TO SOCIAL THREAT 4 Investigating Hypervigilance for Social Threat of Lonely ChildrenResearchers have examined the social information processing biases that serve to maintain loneliness. One such bias is conceptualized as the 'hypervigilance for social threat hypothesis' (HSTH), where it is argued that rejection sensitivity contributes to behavioral deficiencies (e.g., withdrawal) that undermine the opportunities to develop and maintain positive social relationships (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009). Several studies provide support for the HSTH in adults (Jones & Carver, 1991;Jones, Freemon & Goswick, 1981;Sloan & Solano, 1984), but there has been little work on this in children. Confirming the HSTH during childhood is important because it would indicate that this form of social information bias is evident during development and, therefore, a potential contributor to the persistence of loneliness from childhood through to adulthood, which itself predicts mental and physical health. Loneliness and social information processing biasesLoneliness is an unpleasant state that arises from a discrepancy between the interpersonal relationships people want to have, and those they perceive they currently have (Peplau & Perlman, 1982). Loneliness is not linked to the number of friends that a person has (Young, 1982;Qualter & Munn, 2005). It is a prevalent problem in children, adolescents and adults (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; Rotenberg & Hymel, 1999), and is acknowledged in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR: American Psychiatric Association, 2000) because it often causes significant distress a...

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“…As noted previously, this may reflect a trade-off between initial attentional engagement and response latency. That is, initially directing more attention to one class of stimuli (i.e., angry expressions) may slow subsequent responses to other stimuli (i.e., happy expressions) due to difficulties in attentional disengagement from threatening faces (Koster et al, 2004;Fox et al, 2001). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, across both tasks, ERP responses indicative of greater attention to angry as compared to happy expressions were associated with relatively slower explicit categorization decisions to happy expressions. This pattern of results may reflect that participants for whom angry expressions attract more attention (as reflected in the N100 in the race task and the P200 in the emotion task) have difficulties in attentional disengagement from threatening faces (Koster, Crombez, Van Damme, Verschuere, & Houwer, 2004;Fox et al, 2001) that may later translate into slower responses to happy faces.…”

Section: Emotion Contrasts-mentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple cues in social perception: The time course of processing race and facial expression

Kubota

Ito

2007

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

157

182

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The purpose of the present study was to examine the time course of race and expression processing to determine how these cues influence early perceptual as well as explicit categorization judgments. Despite their importance in social perception, little research has examined how social category information and emotional expression are processed over time. Moreover, although models of face processing suggest that the two cues should be processed independently, this has rarely been directly examined. Event-related brain potentials were recorded as participants made race and emotion categorization judgments of Black and White men posing either happy, angry, or neutral expressions. Our findings support that processing of race and emotion cues occur independently and in parallel, relatively early in processing.Faces convey important social information that is useful for a variety of inferences. For instance, information about racial group membership and emotional expression can be informative about an individual's likely traits, attributes, and behavioral intentions (Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998;Brewer, 1988;Devine, 1989;Fiske, Lin, & Neuberg, 1999), and perhaps not surprisingly, extensive research has documented our ability to quickly and efficiently extract both types of information from faces ( Weike, Stockburger, & Hamm, 2004;Vanderploeg, Brown, & Marsh, 1987). While it is possible to consider how individual sources of information affect social inferences, such as how race affects evaluations, it is also important to consider the more naturalistic question of how multiple sources of social information are processed from faces. That is, we can consider how both race and emotion information are processed from the same face.Models of face processing suggest that information about social identity and emotional expression are processed separately and in parallel (Bruce & Young, 1986;Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000). According to Bruce and Young (1986), social category information such as age and gender and information regarding emotional expression are processed by functionally separate components of the face perception system. Moreover, these separable components are assumed to operate in parallel (see also Mouchetant-Rostaing & Giard, 2003), suggesting little interaction between the two types of information, at least in initial stages of perception. Haxby et al. (2000) have similarly argued that the perception of invariant,

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Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety?

Cited by 1,295 publications

References 70 publications

Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

Investigating Hypervigilance for Social Threat of Lonely Children

Multiple cues in social perception: The time course of processing race and facial expression

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