Attentional bias in anxiety: A behavioral and ERP study

Accumulating evidence suggests the existence of a processing bias in favor of threat-related stimulation in anxious individuals. Using behavioral and ERP measures, the present study investigated the deployment of attention to face stimuli with different emotion expressions in high-anxious and low-an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Brain and cognition 2005-10, Vol.59 (1), p.11-22
Main Authors: Bar-Haim, Yair, Lamy, Dominique, Glickman, Shlomit
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Affectivity. Emotion
Anxiety
Anxiety - physiopathology
Anxiety - psychology
Attention
Attention - physiology
Attentional bias
Attitude Measures
Behavioral psychophysiology
Bias
Biological and medical sciences
Cues
Electrophysiology
Emotional Response
Emotions - physiology
ERP
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Facial Expression
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Male
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Perceptual Masking - physiology
Personality. Affectivity
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction Time
Reaction Time - physiology
Recognition (Psychology) - physiology
Reference Values
Selective attention
Visual Perception
Visual Stimuli
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Summary:Accumulating evidence suggests the existence of a processing bias in favor of threat-related stimulation in anxious individuals. Using behavioral and ERP measures, the present study investigated the deployment of attention to face stimuli with different emotion expressions in high-anxious and low-anxious participants. An attention-shifting paradigm was used in which faces with neutral, angry, fearful, sad, or happy expressions were presented singly at fixation. Participants had to fixate on the face cue and then discriminate a target shape that appeared randomly above, below, to the left, or right of the fixated face. The behavioral data show that high-anxious participants were slower to respond to targets regardless of the emotion expressed by the face cue. In contrast, the ERP data indicate that threat-related faces elicited faster latencies and greater amplitudes of early ERP components in high-anxious than in low-anxious individuals. The between-group pattern in ERP waveforms suggests that the slower reaction times in high-anxious participants might reflect increased attentional dwelling on the face cues, rather than a general slowing of response enacting.
ISSN:0278-2626
1090-2147
DOI:10.1016/j.bandc.2005.03.005