Understanding Others: Attention Flashcards
How were cognition and affect linked in the 1800s?
They weren’t. There was a separation between cognition (understanding), affect (feelings) and conation (will)
What is evidence of the ‘re-linking’ of cognition and affect?
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)
What is primacy of affect evidence?
Affective tone of a stimulus generally identified within first few ms and prior to cognitive processing. “Preferences need no inferences” Zajonc
What is primacy of cognition evidence?
Cognition necessary for emotion. Mere exposure as a simple cognitive appraisal of valence (Lazarus 1984)
What is evidence of biases in processing caused by emotional stimuli?
The original Stroop task (Stroop 1935), and the emotional stroop task (Pratto and John 1991)
Who looked at whether some stimuli cause enhancement of attention?
Phelps et al 2006
How can the effects of emotional stimuli on attention be summarised?
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
What are the different models of anxiety, for the effect of anxiety?
Hyper-vigilance, avoidance, process efficiency theory, and attentional control theory
What is the hyper-vigilance model for the effect of anxiety?
Anxiety as hyper-vigilance to threatening stimuli. Beck. Notion of anxiety causing better detection of threat
What is the avoidance model for the effect of anxiety?
Longstanding clinical observations. Socially anxious individuals tend to avoid looking at people (Darwin 1872). Self focused attention (Clark and Wells 1995)
What is process efficiency theory?
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
What is attentional control theory?
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
Do anxious individuals attend towards threatening stimuli?
Dot-probe task. Anxious individuals attend towards the location of threatening word stimulus (MacLeod and Mathews 1988)
What has been found about anxious individuals and the perception of threat?
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)
What is the modified dot-probe task?
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
What are the general findings from modified dot-probe tasks?
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)
What was Mogg and Bradley’s 1999 experiment?
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)
Do anxious participants continue to attend towards threatening stimuli?
Pictorial stimuli (IAPS) Mogg et al 2004. Hyper-vigilance in anxiety may only be present pre-attentionally and at short durations
What is the emotionality hypothesis?
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)
What did Bantin et al 2016 find in a meta-analysis of facial dot-probe tasks in anxiety?
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)
How can addiction affect attention?
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
Is hypervigilance in anxiety really attention capture?
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
What was Fox, Russo and Dutton’s 2002 study?
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)
What is the inhibition of return?
Tendency to not re-fixate on an area that has already been looked at
