The influence of PTSD symptoms on selective visual attention while reading

ABSTRACT

A large body of research has provided evidence that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms are associated with broad changes in attentional processes which are in turn implicated in core facets of emotion regulation. However, prior research has primarily focused on specific task-based evaluations of attention. In the current study, we evaluated eye movement behaviour among adults that endorsed a traumatic event meeting Criterion A and were experiencing a range of PTSD symptoms (N = 55) while they read short trauma-related or neutral passages. We found evidence that PTSD symptoms were associated with a small difference in attentional processes between the two types of passages, with longer first fixations to words in trauma-related passages b = 1.92, 95% CI [0.31, 3.56]. Moreover, within the trauma-related texts we found that greater PTSD symptoms were associated with longer total fixation times b = 9.53, 95% CI [2.20, 16.83] and a greater number of regressions b = 0.07, 95% CI [0.01,0.13] to trauma-related words. Inclusion of an additional 25 participants not endorsing a trauma that met Criterion A did not influence the results in any meaningful way. For the first time, we provide evidence that PTSD symptoms are linked to bias for trauma-related information during a naturalistic, everyday activity – reading.

KEYWORDS:

• Posttraumatic stress disorder
• reading
• eye tracking
• attention bias
• selective visual attention

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

Data and syntax for the current manuscript are available on an online repository: https://osf.io/sfeka/.

Notes

1 Based on reviewer-feedback, we conducted additional analyses including the 25 participants that did not endorse a trauma meeting Criterion A and had eye tracking data in follow-up analyses, with a total sample of 80 participants – inclusion of these additional participants did not lead to any changes in the results and are reported in the supplementary materials.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.