Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety?

@article{Fox2001DoTS,
  title={Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety?},
  author={E. Fox and Riccardo Russo and Robert J Bowles and Kevin Dutton},
  journal={Journal of experimental psychology. General},
  year={2001},
  volume={130 4},
  pages={
          681-700
        }
}
  • E. Fox, R. Russo, K. Dutton
  • Published 1 December 2001
  • Psychology
  • Journal of experimental psychology. General
Biases in information processing undoubtedly play an important role in the maintenance of emotion and emotional disorders. In an attentional cueing paradigm, threat words and angry faces had no advantage over positive or neutral words (or faces) in attracting attention to their own location, even for people who were highly state-anxious. In contrast, the presence of threatening cues (words and faces) had a strong impact on the disengagement of attention. When a threat cue was presented and a… 
View on PubMed
www2.psychology.uiowa.edu
1,421 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
115
Background Citations
447
Methods Citations
98
Results Citations
114

Figures and Tables from this paper

1,421 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

Emotional Distraction in the Context of Memory-Based Orienting of Attention
TLDR
The current findings of attentional capture by threat in the context of a second, powerful endogenous driver of attention underscore the magnitude of anxiety-related attention to threat.
Processing efficiency in anxiety: Evidence from eye-movements during visual search.
Focusing on fear: attentional disengagement from emotional faces
TLDR
Findings demonstrate a specific tendency to dwell on fear-relevant stimuli, as opposed to negative information in general, in high trait-anxious individuals.
Anxiety and attentional bias for threat: an event-related potential study
TLDR
The results suggest that the attentional bias caused by peripheral threatening stimuli is able to modulate the visual inputs in early processing stages, and this mechanism is markedly influenced by an individual's anxiety level.
Emotion Congruent Facilitation of Attention when Processing Anxious Stimuli
Researchers using spatial attention tasks have shown that anxious individuals are quick to orient to threatening information, but have difficulty disengaging attention from that location. We extended…
Orienting and maintenance of attention to threatening facial expressions in anxiety – An eye movement study
Emotional context influences access of visual stimuli to anxious individuals’ awareness
Focus on the positive: Anxiety modulates the effects of emotional stimuli on hemispheric attention
Attentional bias in anxiety: A behavioral and ERP study
Attentional bias for threat: Evidence for delayed disengagement from emotional faces
TLDR
Three new experiments suggesting that the valence of a face cue can influence attentional effects in a cueing paradigm suggest attentional bias in anxiety may reflect a difficulty in disengaging from threat-related and emotional stimuli, and threat- related and ambiguous cues can influence the magnitude of the IOR effect.
...
1
2
3
4
5
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 94 REFERENCES
Attentional bias in emotional disorders.
Selective Processing of Threatening Words in Anxiety: The Role of Awareness
In three experiments, high and low trait-anxious individuals were required to classify a centrally located number as odd or even while ignoring spatially separate threat-related or neutral words. It…
Attentional Bias for Threatening Facial Expressions in Anxiety: Manipulation of Stimulus Duration
The study investigated the time course of attentional biases for emotional facial expressions in high and low trait anxious individuals. Threat, happy, and neutral face stimuli were presented at two…
Anxiety and the Allocation of Attention to Threat
  • C. MacLeod, A. Mathews
  • Psychology
    The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology
  • 1988
TLDR
It is suggested that the attentional response to currently relevant stress-related stimuli may be associated with neither trait nor state anxiety alone, but with an interactive function involving both these variables.
Attentional bias in anxiety and depression: the role of awareness.
TLDR
The depressed group unexpectedly showed greater vigilance for supraliminal anxiety-relevant words than the anxious group, and the hypothesis of an anxiety-related bias in preconscious processes is supported.
Allocation of visual attention and anxiety.
  • E. Fox
  • Psychology
    Cognition & emotion
  • 1993
TLDR
It is concluded that individuals reporting low anxiety cannot be considered as a homogeneous group, and this is an important finding for the understanding of attentional biases and anxiety.
Does anxiety lead to selective processing of threat-related information?
Attentional Bias to Threat: Roles of Trait Anxiety, Stressful Events, and Awareness
TLDR
Assessment of attentional biases for threat stimuli showed that high trait anxious subjects under exam stress showed an attentional bias towards unmasked threat stimuli compared with low trait subjects, suggesting that the attentional biased in high trait subjects may be a function of a prolonged stressor, rather than a transient increase in state anxiety.
Anxiety and the selective processing of emotional information: mediating roles of awareness, trait and state variables, and personal relevance of stimulus materials.
Anxiety and Attentional Bias: State and Trait
Abstract MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata (1986) found that anxious patients showed a tendency to react faster to a probe stimulus that appeared in the location of a threatening visual word rather than in…
...
1
2
3
4
5
...