Attentional Biases and Anxiety Flashcards
What are the three levels of anxiety discussed?
- Trait anxiety
- State anxiety
- Clinical anxiety disorders
What is the Emotional Stroop task?
A task where participants name the color of threat-related words, used to study attentional biases in anxiety.
In which anxiety disorders has the Emotional Stroop effect been observed?
PTSD, Panic Disorder, OCD, Social Phobia, and Specific Phobias (e.g., snakes and spiders).
What did Watts et al. (1986) find in spider phobics using the Emotional Stroop task?
Spider phobics showed slower naming of the color of spider-related words compared to controls.
What is the dot-probe task?
A task where participants respond to the location of a dot that sometimes appears in the location previously occupied by a threat-related stimulus.
What does an attentional bias for threat indicate in the dot-probe task?
Faster responses to the dot when it appears in the location previously occupied by a threat-related stimulus.
What did Bradley, Mogg, & Millar (2000) find in their dot-probe task study?
Attention biases to different kinds of faces (e.g., threat, sad, happy, neutral) were related to self-reported state anxiety and depression.
What did Cannito et al. (2020) find about health anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Health anxiety predicted attentional bias in a COVID-specific dot-probe task.
What did Öhman et al. (2001) discover about fear-relevant stimuli?
People detect fear-relevant stimuli faster, especially if they are fearful of those stimuli.
What are the theoretical issues surrounding attentional biases in anxiety?
- Are biases unconditional?
- Is the bias a cause or effect of anxiety?
- Does anxiety cause attentional biases, or do biases cause anxiety?
How does relevance play a role in attentional biases for anxiety?
In non-clinical populations, emotional distraction occurs only when searching for emotional pictures. In anxious patients, emotional distraction occurs even when searching for neutral pictures.
Are attentional biases specific to anxiety?
Research (Purkis, Lester, & Field, 2011) suggests attentional biases may not be exclusive to anxiety.
How has training been used to study attentional biases?
Probes are consistently presented in the location of threat or non-threat stimuli.
Training groups are tested with novel material to assess induced biases.
What happens when attentional biases are trained?
Training to focus on threat stimuli modestly increases anxiety.
Training to avoid threat stimuli modestly decreases anxiety.
What tasks are used to measure attentional biases (AB) in anxiety?
Emotional Stroop, dot-probe tasks, and visual search tasks.
