Time course of attentional bias to emotional scenes in anxiety: Gaze direction and duration

Abstract

Pictures of emotionally neutral, positive, and negative (threat‐ or harm‐related) scenes were presented for 3 seconds, paired with nonemotional control pictures. The eye fixations of high and low trait anxiety participants were monitored. Intensity of stimulus emotionality was varied, with two levels of perceptual salience for each picture (colour vs. greyscale). Regardless of perceptual salience, high anxiety was associated with preferential attention: (a) towards all types of emotional stimuli in initial orienting, as revealed by a higher probability of first fixation on the emotional picture than on the neutral picture of a pair; (b) towards positive and harm stimuli in a subsequent stage of early engagement, as shown by longer viewing times during the first 500 ms following onset of the pictures; and with (c) attention away from (i.e., avoidance) harm stimuli in a later phase, as indicated by shorter viewing times and lower frequency of fixation during the last 1000 ms of picture exposure. This suggests that the nature of the attentional bias varies as a function of the time course in the processing of emotional pictures.

Notes

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Manuel G. Calvo, Departamento de Psicología Cognitiva, Universidad de La Laguna, 38205 Tenerife, Spain; e‐mail: [email protected]

This research was supported by Grant BSO2001‐3753 from the DGI, Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. We are grateful to Peter Lang, Mike Rink, and Margaret Dowens, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

In the dot probe paradigm, two stimuli (e.g., pictures: one neutral, one threatening) are presented simultaneously and briefly in two locations, followed by a target (a dot, an arrow, etc.). Speeded, or slowed, detection of the target that replaces one of the stimuli (e.g., the threatening), relative to the other, is taken as a measure of attention allocation either towards (vigilance) or away from (avoidance) the corresponding stimulus.

In the cueing paradigm, a cue (e.g., a picture) appears in one of two locations, followed by a target (e.g., a circle or an arrow) in either the cued location (valid trials) or an alternative location (invalid trials). Relative to a no‐cue baseline, speeding in target detection on valid trials would indicate attentional engagement on the cued location, whereas slowing on invalid trials would reveal difficulty in disengaging attention from the cued location, moving, and engaging the other (i.e., the target) location.

A possible reason for the insensitivity of this measure (i.e., eye movements to faces occurred only in 30% of the trials) was that both pictures in each trial could be viewed parafoveally by the participants while they were looking foveally at the central fixation point (as there were only 2.86 degrees of visual angle between the fixation point and the centre of each picture), which probably reduced the need to make saccadic movements. Another possible reason was that the participants had to perform a dot probe detection task, which probably interfered with free looking at the pictures, as participants were asked to look at a central fixation point, and the dot probe to be detected appeared only 500 ms later.

According to their IAPS number, the neutral target pictures were: 2190 (face of man), 2235 (shop assistant), 2393 (factory worker), 2595 (women talking), 2745 (woman at supermaket), 2840 (playing chess), 2850 (tourist), 7493 (man in the street), 7496 (people in the street), and 7550 (man with computer); the threat‐related target pictures were: 3530 (attack with pistol), 6212 (soldier aiming at child), 6230 (aimed gun), 6313 (attack with knife), 6550 (attack with knife), 6560 (attack with pistol), 6838 (police arrest), 6940 (tank warfare), 8485 (fire), 9921 (fire); the harm‐related target pictures were: 2800 (sad child), 3051 (mutilation), 3064 (mutilation), 3181 (battered female), 3350 (infant in intensive care), 9040 (starving child), 9250 (war victim), 9410 (man with child's corpse), 9415 (handicapped men), 9421 (weeping injured soldier); and the positive pictures were: 2040 (baby smiling), 2070 (charming baby), 2165 (father and baby), 2352 (kiss), 2360 (happy family), 2550 (happy old couple), 4641 (romance), 4653 (erotic couple), 4700 (happy young couple), and 7325 (child smiling). The control pictures were: 6150, 7000, 7002, 7004, 7009, 7010, 7020, 7030, 7034, 7035, 7050, 7060, 7080, 7150, 7170, 7175, 7179, 7190, 7205, 7207, 7211, 7217, 7233, 7234, 7490, 7491, 7500, 7510, 7705, 7950.