Modulation of responses to emotional information in pathological anxiety

Abstract

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.

Anxiety-Related Biases in Visual Orienting and Spatial Motor Response Selection Independently Assessed by a Probe-Classification Task

“…The finding of anxiety-related effects of spatial correspondence between emotional stimulus and response is comparable with previous observations of such effects in anxiety, using a different RT task that was designed to measure emotional stimulus-response correspondence effects exclusively (Schrooten & Smulders, 2007Schrooten et al, 2011). In the latter studies, stimulus pairs containing one emotional word and one neutral word were presented, with both words printed in the same color.…”

“…The present findings can be taken to reflect stronger selective activation of motor response tendencies triggered by emotional stimuli in sub-clinical anxiety. One idea is that the emotional stimulus activates a corresponding response tendency (Schrooten & Smulders, 2009;Schrooten et al, 2011). Response modulation due to spatial correspondence between emotional stimulus and response might reflect the preparation of motor responses in the direction of an attended stimulus (Schrooten et al, 2011).…”

“…Effects of spatial correspondence between emotional stimulus and response are theoretically interesting and have been studied by us before (Schrooten & Smulders, 2007Schrooten, Smulders, & Arntz, 2011). The basic idea is that these effects reflect bias in the preparation and selection of motor responses.…”

“…The main innovative aspect of the present study is that, besides bias in attentional orienting (visual attention bias), we also examined bias in motor response selection (motor attention bias), with both biases derived from performance on the same task. With regard to anxiety-related bias in motor response selection, it was hypothesized that high-anxious undergraduates would respond relatively faster when threat-relevant word and response spatially correspond than when they do not (Schrooten & Smulders, 2007Schrooten et al, 2011). Similar effects of exposure duration were expected for bias in response selection as for bias in visual orienting of attention (cf.…”

Sub-optimal presentation of painful facial expressions enhances readiness for action and pain perception following electrocutaneous stimulation

“…In the present study, we aimed to investigate the effect of sub-optimal presentation of painful facial expressions on readiness for action in healthy individuals. Previous studies have shown that sub-optimally presented stimuli can be processed semantically and can influence our behavior ( Van den Bussche et al, 2009 ; Schrooten et al, 2011 ). So it can be expected that also sub-optimally presented painful facial expressions could prime behavioral responses.…”