Threat vs. Threat: Attention to Fear-Related Animals and Threatening Faces

Abstract

It is generally thought to be adaptive that fear relevant stimuli in the environment can capture and hold our attention; and in psychopathology attentional allocation is thought to be cue-specific. Such hypervigilance toward threatening cues or difficulty to disengage attention from threat has been demonstrated for a variety of stimuli, for example, toward evolutionary prepared animals or toward socially relevant facial expressions. Usually, specific stimuli have been examined in individuals with particular fears (e.g., animals in animal fearful and faces in socially fearful participants). However, different kinds of stimuli are rarely examined in one study. Thus, it is unknown how different categories of threatening stimuli compete for attention and how specific kinds of fears modulate these attentional processes. In this study, we used a free viewing paradigm: pairs of pictures with threat-related content (spiders or angry faces) or neutral content (butterflies or neutral faces) were presented side by side (i.e., spiders and angry faces, angry and neutral faces, spiders and butterflies, butterflies and neutral faces). Eye-movements were recorded while spider fearful, socially anxious, or non-anxious participants viewed the picture pairs. Results generally replicate the finding that unpleasant pictures more effectively capture attention in the beginning of a trial compared to neutral pictures. This effect was more pronounced in spider fearful participants: the higher the fear the quicker they were in looking at spiders. This was not the case for high socially anxious participants and pictures of angry faces. Interestingly, when presented next to each other, there was no preference in initial orientation for either spiders or angry faces. However, neutral faces were looked at more quickly than butterflies. Regarding sustained attention, we found no general preference for unpleasant pictures compared to neutral pictures.

Stress Makes the Difference: Social Stress and Social Anxiety in Decision-Making Under Uncertainty

“…When they were confronted with socially fear-relevant material in the eBART , they did not differ from low socially anxious participants. This is in line with previous research that shows findings with fear-relevant spider pictures cannot be generalized directly to facial expressions ( Alpers et al, 2011 ; Diemer et al, 2015 ; Berdica et al, 2018 ). This may be due to the cognitive complexity of social anxiety compared to specific phobias.…”

“…As it is also unclear if effects found in studies with spider-fearful individuals can be generalized to social anxiety (see Berdica et al, 2018 ), we sought to replicate our earlier findings of spider-fearful and spider non-fearful individuals ( Hengen and Alpers, accepted pending revision ) in social anxiety. We expected that social anxiety would lead to an overall risk avoidance behavior; this being most pronounced in the context of fear-relevant stimuli.…”

Reversing Threat to Safety: Incongruence of Facial Emotions and Instructed Threat Modulates Conscious Perception but Not Physiological Responding

“…Second, the a priori valence (i.e., intrinsic affective meaning) of an emotional facial expression was expected to influence the stability of instructed threat effects. This hypothesis relates to previous research that tested visual facial information as an “evolutionary prepared” stimulus type similar to pictures of snakes and spiders (e.g., Seligman, 1971; Lipp and Edwards, 2002; Berdica et al, 2018). For instance, Rowles et al (2012) observed more persistent threat effects when angry (but not happy) facial expressions served as conditioned threat cue in a Pavlovian fear conditioning experiment.…”

The priority of goal-relevant information and evolutionarily threatening information in early attention processing:Evidence from behavioral and ERP study

“…In particular, a wealth of studies have shown that threatening information attracts attention. Various kinds of threatening stimuli, such as angry faces 3,4 , dangerous animals [5][6][7] , and violent situations 8 , have been included in these studies. Recent evidence has revealed that the automatic processing of threatening information is inherent.…”