Biased attentional engagement with, and disengagement from, negative information: Independent cognitive pathways to anxiety vulnerability?

Abstract

Cognitive models of anxiety propose that selective attention to negative information plays a causal role in heightened anxiety vulnerability and dysfunction. However, there has been theoretical disagreement concerning whether anxiety-linked attentional biases reflect enhanced attentional engagement with, or impaired attentional disengagement from, negative information. We contend that previous methodologies have not been optimal in terms of their capacity to differentiate both types of bias. The present study introduces a refined methodology, in which the conventional dot-probe task is modified in a novel manner to enable the independent assessment of these components of attention. The findings demonstrate that facilitated attentional engagement and impaired attentional disengagement are both characteristic of elevated levels of anxiety vulnerability. Moreover, these prove to be unrelated facets of attentional selectivity that independently contribute to variation in anxiety vulnerability. We discuss the possibility that these two types of attentional bias may represent independent pathways to anxiety vulnerability.

Keywords:

• Anxiety
• Attentional bias
• Engagement
• Disengagement
• Dot-probe task

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Corrigendum

Notes

¹ In order to ensure the sampling was even across the range, an equal number of males and females were chosen from each sextile of the full range of trait anxiety scores.

² Although care was taken to ensure that the abstract images did not differ from the representational images in striking ways in terms of their physical properties we cannot exclude the possibility of some physical differences. However, the purpose of this study was to examine individual differences in attention paid to the representational images as a function of their emotional valence, as such, exact matching of abstract images to representational images in terms of their physical properties was unnecessary. Furthermore, while the abstract images were chosen on the basis of being devoid of representational content rather than on the basis of valenced content, when six psychology graduates were invited to rate the valence of these images on the same rating scale as that employed with the IAPS images, the average rating was 4.77 (SD=0.23), which supports the idea that these abstract images are indeed affectively neutral.

³ A common practice is to subdivide participants into high and low trait anxiety groups on the basis of a median-split (e.g. Derakshan & Koster, 2010; Mogg & Bradley, 1999) and in order to permit comparability with past results this approach has been adopted in the present analysis. Although this approach has the advantage of rendering interactions transparent it is generally considered to be a non-optimal method of analysing continuous data, as noted by MacCallum, Zhang, Preacher, and Rucker (2002). Consequently this analysis will be followed by correlational analysis in order to investigate the association between trait anxiety and attentional bias.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This work was partly supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP0879589 and partly by a grant from the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS-UEFISCDI, Project number: PNII-ID-PCCE-2011-2-0045.