attentional bias Flashcards
anxiety - subclinical variation and clinical contexts
- Trait anxiety - how anxious you generally are as a person.
- State anxiety - different situations can lead to different levels of anxiety, it is different for different people.
- Clinical anxiety disorders - generalised anxiety disorders, compulsive disorders.
the emotional Stroop
- Naming the colour of threat-related words - upsetting words like death or cancer.
- Found in (Williams, Mathews and Macleod, 1996):
- PTSD
- Panic disorder
- OCD
- Social phobia
- Specific phobia - snakes and spiders
watts et al (1986)
· Naming the colour of threat-related words vs spider-related words in spider phobics and controls.
· Used the words hairy, legs, crawl.
· Used neutral words as well.
- The normal words was slower, but emotional words was much quicker, and spider words was in the middle.
visual attention
· Dot-probe task:
1. Words
* Monitor two locations and it is going to appear in either one.
- They will either have a positive or negative word appears before.
2. Pictures
* Monitor two locations
- Wil show facial expressions - positive or threatening expressions
MacLeod and Matthews (1988)
- Compared them with high or lower levels of trait anxiety.
- Different times before the examination - 12 weeks before and 1 week before exam.
- Can also change state anxiety - looks at both trait and state.
- People with low trait - little anxiety and then right before exam avoided anxiety.
- People with high trait - had low anxiety before and then a week before had high anxiety.
attention to faces in anxiety
- Bradley, Mogg and Millar (2000):
- Used a dot-probe task to look at attention to different kinds of faces (threat, sad, happy, neutral).
- Student sample.
- Self-reported state anxiety/depression (POMS).
visual attention 2
- Dot-probe task
- Words
- Pictures
- Visual search - another way to see how people attention is drawn to fear stimuli
visual search
· Ohman et al (2001)
· People are faster to detect fear relevant stimuli.
- Especially if they are fearful of them.
theoretical issues
· Are biases unconditional?
· Is the attentional bias a cause or effect?
- Does anxiety cause the attentional bias?
- Or does the attentional bias cause anxiety?
the role of relevance
· Dot probe, visual search and emotional stroop all use task-relevant location.
- All put the things you are meant to be ignoring are in the place that you are meant to pay attention to - so cant be truly irrelevant.
the role of relevance
· Non-clinical population:
- Emotional distraction occurs only when searching for emotional pictures.
- Task was to only pay attention to the things in the central column.
- When central picture was emotional the other emotional images in the periphery were a distraction.
· Patients under treatment for anxiety disorder:
- Emotional distraction occurs even when searching for neutral pictures.
- Shows that emotion is relevant, but is more relevant for an anxious person.
- Is threat just more relevant for anxious individuals?
are attentional biases specific to anxiety
· Purkis, Lester and Field (2011)
· Used a visual task search.
· Distracted about what is relevant to you.
· Questions if it is anything to do with emotion?
- Is our brain just prioritising things that our important to us?
are attentional biases a cause or effect?
· Training biases:
· Probes are consistently presented in the location of threat or non-threat items according to training group.
· Novel material tests the induced bias.
- Train you in different locations - so you would have a bias towards the threat or a bias away from it.
· Training as treatment:
· Anxious participants are ‘trained’ to avoid threat pictures/words.
- Probes appear behind non-threat stimuli.
summary
· AB to threat shown in relation to:
- State anxiety
- Trait anxiety
- A variety of anxiety disorders.
· AB measured using tasks such as Stroop and dot probe.
· Some evidence from training studies that AB influences anxiety.
- Recent research questions role of relevance in anxiety.
