Focused on the negative: emotions and visuospatial attention in generalized anxiety disorder

ABSTRACT

Global-local visuospatial attention is a core mechanism which highly affects the way we process our visuospatial environment. The current study aimed to examine the effect of negative emotions on global-local visuospatial processing in participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and in healthy controls (HCs). Participants performed two versions of the global-local-arrow task: they were asked to determine the direction (left or right) of the global arrow or of the local arrows that composed it, with or without emotional prime-cues. In the non-emotional task and in the neutral-valence condition of the emotional task, the GAD group did not differ from that of HCs – both groups exhibited a classic global processing bias (reactions to the global dimension were faster and less affected by the local dimension). In the negative-valence condition, global processing bias was only slightly reduced in HCs and almost completely eliminated in the GAD group. The results of the current study suggest that, in non-emotional conditions, global processing bias does not differ significantly between individuals with GAD and HCs. However, task-irrelevant negative cues were found to have a greater impact in reducing global bias for individuals with GAD compared to HCs. Potential implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Visuospatial attention
• Navon task
• Global-local processing
• IAPS
• Anxiety
• Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the following individuals for their assistance in collecting the data: Ms. Nitzan Ganor, Dr. Amir Avnit, and Ms. Tzlil Malka of Ben-Gurion University, and Mr. Daniel Mandelbaum of the Hebrew University. In addition, I would like to thank Ms. Hadar Naftalovich of the Hebrew University for her input on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a similar analysis using the interference effect (incongruent – congruent) as a dependent variable, see supplementary materials (S3).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) under [grant number 1341/18].