Time course of attentional bias in anxiety: Emotion and gender specificity

Abstract

Anxiety is characterized by cognitive biases, including attentional bias to emotional (especially threatening) stimuli. Accounts differ on the time course of attention to threat, but the literature generally confounds emotional valence and arousal and overlooks gender effects, both addressed in the present study. Nonpatients high in self-reported anxious apprehension, anxious arousal, or neither completed an emotion-word Stroop task during ERP recording. Hypotheses differentiated time course of preferential attention to emotional stimuli. Individuals high in anxious apprehension and anxious arousal showed distinct early ERP evidence of preferential processing of emotionally arousing stimuli along with some evidence for gender differences in processing. Healthy controls showed gender differences at both early and later processing stages. The conjunction of valence, arousal, and gender is critical in the time course of attentional bias.

Neural time course of threat-related attentional bias and interference in panic and obsessive–compulsive disorders

“…Generally these non-clinical studies did not find RT interference Li, et al, 2007;Sass, et al, 2010;Taake, et al, 2009;Thomas, et al, 2007), although it was induced in limited conditions in two studies (Taake, et al, 2009;van Hooff, et al, 2008).…”

“…No consistent patterns emerged for N1, P2 or N2. Many studies found higher P3, LPPs (Li, et al, 2007;Sass, et al, 2010;Taake, Jaspers-Fayer, & Liotti, 2009;Thomas, et al, 2007), to negative versus netural stimuli.…”

Selective Attentional Bias Towards Pain-Related Threat in Fibromyalgia: Preliminary Evidence for Effects of Mindfulness Meditation Training

“…Deliberate strategic and elaborative processes are thought to be mechanisms that arise later in attentional processing in order to counteract automatic biased processing of threat (Mathews and MacLeod 1994;Mogg and Bradley 1998;Yiend 2010), also leading to interference with ongoing task demands. Some evidence from research using the dot-probe paradigm in patients with anxiety has suggested that automatic allocation of attentional resources towards threat could potentially enhance an anxious state, which could further increase the dwell time on the threatening stimulus and thereby delay disengagement and facilitation of threat-congruent probe detection (Fox et al 2001;Ohman et al 2001;Cisler et al 2009); however there is further evidence suggesting that avoidance may also occur before there is conscious awareness, at the perceptual level, and immediately following threat detection (Mogg and Bradley 1998;Mauss et al 2007;Sass et al 2010;Huijding et al 2011). Such evidence is further supported by electrophysiological event-related potential (ERP) research, visual perception, and eye-tracking studies that have all indicated that shifting patterns of attention towards threatening stimuli may occur on the order of milliseconds and a time-course for avoidance of emotional stimuli can be described at the non-conscious level paralleling early activation of brain areas associated with threat detection (Bannerman et al 2010a, b;Koivisto and Revonsuo 2010;Railo et al 2011).…”

The age of anxiety: role of animal models of anxiolytic action in drug discovery

“…Non-patients with increased levels of self-reported anxiety also display higher emotional bias towards emotionally valent words. (Tulen et al, 1989;Williams et al, 1996;Leite et al, 1999;Becker et al, 2001;Sass et al, 2010) Dot probe task Subjects are presented a combination of emotional and neutral facial expressions, and are asked to identify a dot sometimes presented in combination. Startle response to is measured both at baseline levels and subsequent to expose to the CS.…”