Using panicogenic inhalations of carbon dioxide enriched air to induce attentional bias for threat: Implications for the development of anxiety disorders

Abstract

The tendency for anxious individuals to selectively attend to threatening information is believed to cause and exacerbate anxious emotional responding in a self-perpetuating cycle. The present study sought to examine the relation between differential interoceptive conditioning (IC) using carbon dioxide inhalation as a panicogenic unconditioned stimulus (US) and the development of Stroop colour-naming interference to various non-word conditioned stimuli (CSs). Healthy university students (N = 27) underwent the assessment of colour-naming interference to reinforced CS+ and non-reinforced CS− non-words prior to and following differential fear conditioning. Participants showed greater magnitude electrodermal and verbal-evaluative responses to the CS+ over the CS− non-word following IC, and demonstrated the expected slower colour-naming latencies to the CS+ compared to the CS− non-word from baseline to post-conditioning. We discuss the relation between fear learning and the emergence of attentional bias for threat to further understand the maintenance of anxiety disorders.

Keywords:

• Stroop colour-naming interference
• Fear conditioning
• CO₂ inhalation
• Anxiety disorders
• Humans

The authors thank Charles Raffaele, Katie Matjuk and Tess Larina for helping with the administration of the tasks, Erica Moses for her assistance during data reduction and analysis and Dean Acheson for reading and commenting on an earlier version of the manuscript.

This research was partially supported by grants from the Spanish Fulbright Alumni Association [EX-2007-0044], and the Department of Science and Innovation, Government of Spain, to the first author.

Part of this material was presented at the 35th Annual Convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis, Phoenix, 2009, and the 43rd Annual Convention of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, New York, 2009.

The authors thank Charles Raffaele, Katie Matjuk and Tess Larina for helping with the administration of the tasks, Erica Moses for her assistance during data reduction and analysis and Dean Acheson for reading and commenting on an earlier version of the manuscript.

This research was partially supported by grants from the Spanish Fulbright Alumni Association [EX-2007-0044], and the Department of Science and Innovation, Government of Spain, to the first author.

Part of this material was presented at the 35th Annual Convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis, Phoenix, 2009, and the 43rd Annual Convention of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, New York, 2009.