Links between neuroticism, emotional distress, and disengaging attention: Evidence from a single-target RSVP task

Abstract

Anxiety and depression are often associated with attention control deficits, but few studies have explored whether neuroticism can account for these links. In the present study, undergraduate students (n=146) completed self-report measures of neuroticism, worry, anxious arousal, and anhedonic depression and also completed a visual attention task in which they were asked to identify a red target letter embedded within a rapid sequence of items. Neuroticism was associated with detection of the target when it was preceded by a distracter with which it shared a feature in common (a green letter). Specifically, these distracters produced longer attentional blinks in individuals with elevated levels of neuroticism. In contrast, target detection was not significantly associated with worry, anxious arousal, or anhedonic depression. We discuss the implications of this link between neuroticism and attention for cognitive models of emotional distress and disorders.

Keywords:

• Neuroticism
• Attention
• Disengagement
• Anxiety
• Depression

Acknowledgments

KB was the lead investigator on all aspects of this study and wrote the initial draft of the manuscript. All authors edited and revised the manuscript and contributed to the theoretical discussion. We would like to thank Eamon Caddigan for his technical assistance in programming the visual attention task used in this study.

Notes

¹In traditional (two-target) RSVP tasks, target detection is generally not suppressed when the first target appears immediately before the second—a phenomenon referred to as “lag 1 sparing”. However, we did not expect to observe lag 1 sparing in our task since this effect was not present in the study upon which the task was based (Spalek et al., 2006).

²In light of evidence that the relation between neuroticism and attention may vary by gender (e.g., Wallace & Newman, 1998), we also ran our analyses separately for males and females. However, no significant gender differences emerged.

³While we conceptualise worry, anxious arousal, and anhedonic depression as symptoms of distress, all three have modest to strong temporal stability (Meyer et al., 1990; Watson et al., 1995), suggesting they fall somewhere between states and traits (see Clark et al., 1994, for a more detailed discussion of this issue). Further, though anxiety and depression are often conceptualised in categorical terms, research suggests that both are dimensional in nature (see Brown & Barlow, 2009).