Selective attention to threatening faces in delusion‐prone individuals

Abstract

Introduction. Selective attention to threat‐related information has been associated with clinical delusions in schizophrenia and nonclinical delusional ideation in healthy individuals. However, it is unclear whether biased attention for threat reflects early engagement effects on selective attention, or later difficulties in disengaging attention from perceived threat. The present study examined which of these processes operate in nonclinical delusion‐prone individuals.

We would like to thank Dr Romina Palermo for her assistance in preparing this manuscript.

Methods. A total of 100 psychologically healthy participants completed the Peters et al. (1999) Delusions Inventory (PDI). Twenty‐two scoring in the upper quartile (high‐PDI group) and 22 scoring in the lower quartile (low‐PDI group) completed a modified dot‐probe task. Participants detected dot‐probes appearing 200, 500, or 1250 ms after an angry‐neutral face pair or a happy‐neutral face pair.

Results. High‐PDI individuals responded faster to dot‐probes presented in the same location as angry compared to happy faces at the short 200 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), but only when the emotional faces were presented to the left visual field. At the two longer SOAs (500 ms, 1250 ms), the high‐PDI group were also faster to respond to dot‐probes presented in the same location as angry compared to happy faces and slower to respond to dot‐probes presented in different spatial locations to angry (vs. happy) faces. The latter effects were seen whether emotional faces were presented to the left or the right visual field.

Conclusions. Results support the operation of emotion‐selective engagement and defective disengagement for threat‐related facial expressions (i.e., anger) in delusion‐prone individuals.

Notes

We would like to thank Dr Romina Palermo for her assistance in preparing this manuscript.

¹ To ascertain the robustness of our findings, a five‐way ANOVA was also carried out on mean RTs of the raw data (i.e., without excluding outliers). Results approached but did not reach statistical significance, F(2, 41) = 2.83, p = .071. However, the raw data did contain several outliers. These were excluded and mean RTs were recalculated with the outliers removed and results reanalysed. These analyses revealed a significant five‐way interaction when outliers exceeding 2 SDs were excluded F(2, 41) = 3.39, p = .04, and when outliers exceeding 1.5 SDs were excluded, F(2, 41) = 3.37, p = .04. Results of subsequent analyses using the mean RT data revealed generally similar patterns of findings to those reported for median RTs.

² Although we note here that no simple contrasts reached statistical significance when alpha levels were Bonferroni‐adjusted.