I don’t know where to look: the impact of intolerance of uncertainty on saccades towards non-predictive emotional face distractors

ABSTRACT

Attentional bias to uncertain threat is associated with anxiety disorders. Here we examine the extent to which emotional face distractors (happy, angry and neutral) and individual differences in intolerance of uncertainty (IU), impact saccades in two versions of the “follow a cross” task. In both versions of the follow the cross task, the probability of receiving an emotional face distractor was 66.7%. To increase perceived uncertainty regarding the location of the face distractors, in one of the tasks additional non-predictive cues were presented before the onset of the face distractors and target. We did not find IU to impact saccades towards non-cued face distractors. However, we found IU, over Trait Anxiety, to impact saccades towards non-predictive cueing of face distractors. Under these conditions, IU individuals’ eyes were pulled towards angry face distractors and away from happy face distractors overall, and the speed of this deviation of the eyes was determined by the combination of the cue and emotion of the face. Overall, these results suggest a specific role of IU on attentional bias to threat during uncertainty. These findings highlight the potential of intolerance of uncertainty-based mechanisms to help understand anxiety disorder pathology and inform potential treatment targets.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• emotion
• saccades
• intolerance of uncertainty
• anxiety

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Rebecca Stewart, Brendan Williams and Louis Williams for their help in data collection. This research was funded by an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Placement by the University of Reading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 To test for order effects in either of the tasks, we conducted a series of MLMs for saccade landing position and saccade latency: For the non-cue version of the task, we conducted a 2 Emotion (Angry, Happy) × 2 Order (Cue Task, Non-Cue Task). For the cue version of the task, we conducted a 2 Emotion (Angry, Happy) × 2 Cue (Cued Face Distractor, Non-Cued Face Distractor) × 2 SOA (100, 400) × 2 Order (Cue Task, Non-Cue Task). We found no main effects or interactions with Order for saccade latency and saccade landing position, Max F = 2.439, p = .120.