Understanding Others: Attention

Question 1

How were cognition and affect linked in the 1800s?

Answer 1

They weren’t. There was a separation between cognition (understanding), affect (feelings) and conation (will)

Question 2

What is evidence of the ‘re-linking’ of cognition and affect?

Answer 2

Demonstrations of affective judgements influencing social judgements and decisions (Zajonc 1980), cognitive approaches to emotional disorders, and neural structures underlying affect as essential in making adaptive cognitive responses (Adolphs et al 1998)

Question 3

What is primacy of affect evidence?

Answer 3

Affective tone of a stimulus generally identified within first few ms and prior to cognitive processing. “Preferences need no inferences” Zajonc

Question 4

What is primacy of cognition evidence?

Answer 4

Cognition necessary for emotion. Mere exposure as a simple cognitive appraisal of valence (Lazarus 1984)

Question 5

What is evidence of biases in processing caused by emotional stimuli?

Answer 5

The original Stroop task (Stroop 1935), and the emotional stroop task (Pratto and John 1991)

Question 6

Who looked at whether some stimuli cause enhancement of attention?

Answer 6

Phelps et al 2006

Question 7

How can the effects of emotional stimuli on attention be summarised?

Answer 7

Individuals seem to have a general bias to processing and attending towards threatening stimuli. Possibility of a specialised rough, fast threat detection pathway, although evidence for this pathway is problematic

Question 8

What are the different models of anxiety, for the effect of anxiety?

Answer 8

Hyper-vigilance, avoidance, process efficiency theory, and attentional control theory

Question 9

What is the hyper-vigilance model for the effect of anxiety?

Answer 9

Anxiety as hyper-vigilance to threatening stimuli. Beck. Notion of anxiety causing better detection of threat

Question 10

What is the avoidance model for the effect of anxiety?

Answer 10

Longstanding clinical observations. Socially anxious individuals tend to avoid looking at people (Darwin 1872). Self focused attention (Clark and Wells 1995)

Question 11

What is process efficiency theory?

Answer 11

Eysenck and Calvo 1992. Worry and self preoccupation of anxiety reduce WM availability and alter foal to minimise anxiety. Not specific to emotional social stimuli

Question 12

What is attentional control theory?

Answer 12

Eysenck et al 2007. Goal directed (top down) and stimulus driven (bottom up) systems. Anxiety increases stimulus driven. Anxiety leads to difficulty inhibiting attention to irrelevant stimuli for threatening stimuli, and when task demands are high

Question 13

Do anxious individuals attend towards threatening stimuli?

Answer 13

Dot-probe task. Anxious individuals attend towards the location of threatening word stimulus (MacLeod and Mathews 1988)

Question 14

What has been found about anxious individuals and the perception of threat?

Answer 14

General findings that anxious individuals are distracted by threatening stimuli in the world and attend towards threatening stimuli. The problem, however, is a lack of ecological validity (facial expressions as stimuli)

Question 15

What is the modified dot-probe task?

Answer 15

Effect of duration of face presentation. Automatic fast ore-attentive threat detection. Attention may be captured by threatening stimuli very quickly prior to awareness. Related to pulvinar threat detection pathway theory

Question 16

What are the general findings from modified dot-probe tasks?

Answer 16

Anxious participants attend to threat, and non-anxious participants attend away from threatening stimuli. Studies have also been done into he physiological effects of threatening stimuli without awareness (Öhman)

Question 17

What was Mogg and Bradley’s 1999 experiment?

Answer 17

1) faces presented for 14ms, 2) faces presented for 34ms, 3) faces presented for 15ms. Participants attend threatening faces prior to fully perceiving them. Evidence that this effect is greater for anxious participants is mixed. Effect is for face stimuli presented to the left (possibly indicative of hemispheric bias to the right)

Question 18

Do anxious participants continue to attend towards threatening stimuli?

Answer 18

Pictorial stimuli (IAPS) Mogg et al 2004. Hyper-vigilance in anxiety may only be present pre-attentionally and at short durations

Question 19

What is the emotionality hypothesis?

Answer 19

A number of studies have also reported greater bias to happy faces in anxious individuals. Opens up question of whether it is hyper-vigilance to social stimuli generally, or if expressive daces are threatening, or due to stimulus complexity. Overall idea that anxious individuals show more interest in emotion (Martin, Williams and Clark 1991)

Question 20

What did Bantin et al 2016 find in a meta-analysis of facial dot-probe tasks in anxiety?

Answer 20

Studies show mixed results. Generally no bias in non-anxious individuals. Bias in anxious individuals (effect greatest at short exposures). Suggest using eye movements for later attentional processes as not useful to study early attentional effects *Stevens, Rist and Gerlach 2011)

Question 21

How can addiction affect attention?

Answer 21

Alcohol: similar but slower biases in heavy drinkers (Field et al 1999). Attention to smoking related pictures in individuals who had made more attempts to quit (Field et al 1999). Hyper-vigilance not restricted to evolutionary salient stimuli like facial expressions. Attentional capture by addiction is due to relevance of stimuli

Question 22

Is hypervigilance in anxiety really attention capture?

Answer 22

Most findings from the dot-probe task interpreted in terms of vigilance to threatening stimuli. Notion of better search for threatening faces. Alternatively, findings may be due to a difficulty in disengaging attention from threatening faces

Question 23

What was Fox, Russo and Dutton’s 2002 study?

Answer 23

Inhibition of return for faces except in high anxious group for angry faces. However, angry schematic faces are picked out using a different strategy than is used for more realistic stimuli (Juth et al 2005)

Question 24

What is the inhibition of return?

Answer 24

Tendency to not re-fixate on an area that has already been looked at

Question 25

What did Capitão et al 2014 find?

Answer 25

Neutral and fearful faces detected earlier than happy. More anxious quicker to detect fear than happy

Question 26

How can the biases in attention be summarised?

Answer 26

Larger biases in attention to threatening stimuli including faces are present in anxiety. Attention very quickly directed to threatening (angry) face stimuli. But does anxiety lead to better sensitivity to threat or difficulties in disengagement of attention? Biases in the processing appear to follow bias in attention. Anxious individuals are more biased to process threat related information

Question 27

Are anxious individuals more distracted by threat related information?

Answer 27

Modified stroop test. Anxious participants take longer listing the colours of the threatening word list than the non-threatened words (Richards and Millwood 1989)

Question 28

What have attentional blink studies shown?

Answer 28

Fox 2005. Participants responded by indicating whether there had been an emotional face. Varied whether participants also identified the T1 image (irrelevant stimuli). Varied facial expression at T2 (happy or angry). Varied time between T1 and T2