Selective processing of negative information: Effects of clinical anxiety, concurrent depression, and awareness.

Abstract

Anxious patients (n = 20) and normal controls (n = 20) carried out a modified Stroop color-naming task with anxiety-and depression-related words in supraliminal and subliminal exposure conditions. Within the anxious group, patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) without concurrent depression (n = 11) showed more color-naming interference for anxiety words than neutral words in comparison with patients with a combined diagnosis of GAD and depression (n = 9). Compared with controls, the GAD subgroup without concurrent depression showed slower color naming for negative than neutral words, in both supraliminal and subliminal conditions, replicating K. Mogg, B. P. Bradley, R. Williams, and A. Mathews's (1993) results. These findings provide further evidence of an anxiety-related bias for negative information in preconscious processes and highlight the importance of assessing concurrent depression.

Common regions of dorsal anterior cingulate and prefrontal–parietal cortices provide attentional control of distracters varying in emotionality and visibility

“…This issue has direct implications for the understanding of a variety of psychiatric disorders including anxiety disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder. Individuals with these disorders are characterized by increased susceptibility to emotional interference relative to healthy individuals (Armony et al, 2005;Phan et al, 2006;Williams et al, 2006) even when the emotional stimuli are subliminal (Armony et al, 2005;Bradley et al, 1995;Mineka & Ohman, 2002;Mogg et al, 1993). It is important to determine whether there are systems which specifically respond to emotional distracters (and which, when dysfunctional, might lead to this increased susceptibility in anxiety disorders) or whether responding to emotional distracters recruits general attentional systems (indicating more general attentional difficulties in anxiety disorders or that the increased susceptibility reflects increased emotional responding).…”

Selective attention for masked and unmasked threatening words in anxiety: Effects of trait anxiety, state anxiety and awareness

“…Despite chance performance in determining the lexical status of the item before the mask, a number of studies have reported data showing that relative to non-anxious controls, anxious individuals are slower to name the colour of masked threat words compared to masked non-threat control words. These effects have been reported in clinically anxious samples (e.g., Bradley et al, 1995;Foa, Feske, Murdock, Kozak & McCarthy, 1991;Harvey et al, 1996;Lundh et al, 1999) and in HTA participants experiencing high levels of state anxiety (e.g., MacLeod & Hagan, 1992; MacLeod & Rutherford, 1992;Rutherford, MacLeod & Campbell, 2004).…”

“…It is worth noting that the present study employed a sample chosen explicitly on the basis of low depression scores. Anxiety and depression are known to strongly co-vary and because previous research had indicated that depression might not be associated with a bias to selectively process briefly presented negative material (see e.g., Bradley et al, 1995) we considered this exclusion criteria necessary to permit a sensitive test of preattentive effects in genuinely LTA and HTA participants by limiting the potentially contaminating effects of depression. As such, the present HTA sample is unusual with respect to how anxiety usually manifests and some caution may be warranted in generalising the results to individuals reporting high levels of depression.…”

“…The results from a number of studies using the emotional Stroop procedure have shown that relative to non-anxious controls, anxious participants are slower to name the colour of threat words than neutral words, presumably because the content of the item interferes with performance on the colour naming task. Threat related biases have shown to be associated with a variety of clinical anxiety disorders including PTSD (e.g., Harvey, Bryant & Rapee, 1996), panic disorder (e.g., Lundh, Wikström, Westerlund & Öst, 1999;McNally, Riemann & Kim, 1990), GAD (e.g., Bradley, Mogg, Millar & White, 1995;Mogg, Bradley, Williams & Mathews, 1993), OCD (e.g., Cohen, Lachenmeyer & Springer, 2003), and generalised social phobia (Amir, Freshman & Foa, 2002), and in non-clinical high trait anxious individuals who experience elevations in state anxiety (e.g., Edwards, Burt & Lipp, 2006;Miller & Patrick, 2000). Importantly, because participants are instructed to ignore the meaning of the item and to name the colour as quickly as possible, these data suggest that selective threat bias effects might operate automatically, at least in the sense that they occur without volition.…”

“…Prior to participation all provided voluntary informed consent, and in return received subject credit. Because previous research had demonstrated that high levels of depression might conceal masked threat effects in anxiety (Bradley, Mogg, Millar & White, 1995), only those who scored 16 points or below on the Beck Depression Inventory -Revised (BDI-R; Beck, Rush, Shaw & Emery, 1979;Beck & Steer, 1993) participated. To reduce the effects of social desirability in differentiating the HTA and LTA groups (see Weinberger, Swartz & Davidson, 1979), only those who scored 5 or fewer socially desirable responses on the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale-Form XI (MCSDS; Crowne & Marlowe, 1960;Strahan & Gerbasi, 1972) participated.…”