The interaction effect of attentional bias and attentional control on dispositional anxiety among adolescents

Abstract

Research has shown that children and adolescents with attentional control deficits tend to have high anxiety and exhibit threat-related selective attentional bias. This study aimed to investigate how positive and negative attentional biases would interact with attentional control on dispositional anxiety. One hundred and twenty participants aged 18 years of age or younger participated in a visual dot-probe task to measure their attentional bias and completed psychological questionnaires to measure their trait anxiety, and attentional control. Mean reaction times to the probe in milliseconds were used to measure attentional bias. Overall, our participants showed a bigger tendency towards attending to positive emotional stimuli than to negative emotional stimuli. Adolescents with high dispositional anxiety showed poorer attentional control. Regression analyses showed that attentional control interact with negative attentional bias to affect anxiety. For participants with high attentional control, higher negative attentional bias was associated with lower trait anxiety. Trait anxiety was not related to negative attentional bias for participants with low attentional control. Positive attentional bias showed no significant relationship with dispositional anxiety, either alone or in interaction with attentional control. Theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are also discussed.

Negative Bias During Early Attentional Engagement in Major Depressive Disorder as Examined Using a Two-Stage Model: High Sensitivity to Sad but Bluntness to Happy Cues

“…Exclusion criteria were neurological disorders and any comorbid Axis I disorders. Particularly, in view of the fact that anxiety and depressive symptoms are highly comorbid ( Mineka et al, 1998 ; Kessler et al, 2005 ), and that many studies found a correlation between anxiety and abnormality of attention modulation of emotion (e.g., Mueller et al, 2009 ; Lin et al, 2015 ; Ho et al, 2017 ), we only recruited MDD patients without a diagnosis of anxiety disorder in this study. Furthermore, MDD patients with psychotic features, bipolar disorder, or Axis II disorders were excluded.…”

The effect of positive and negative memory bias on anxiety and depression symptoms among adolescents

“…The avoidance behavior commonly found in depressive individuals (Ottenbreit & Dobson, ) might interfere with the selective rehearsal of TBR positive‐valence words, which was an important cognitive process in the item method used in the present study (Basden et al., ). A recent study also showed that anxiety interacts with attentional control on positive attentional bias among adolescents (Ho, Yeung, & Mak, ). Given the high comorbidity of anxiety and depression among young people (Anderson & Hope, ), other potential moderators should be investigated further in future studies (Mitte, ).…”

Emotion and anxiety interact to bias spatial attention.

“…However, extremely anxious individuals may not have the attentional control to implement this strategy. The lack of attentional control may, in fact, lead to greater attentional maintenance on arousing stimuli as they are not able to disengage (Ho et al, 2017; Taylor et al, 2016). More research needs to be done to better understand the role of attentional control in these attentional biases and whether valence intensity modulates participants’ ability to employ top-down strategies.…”