Temporal dynamics of anxiety-related attentional bias: is affective context a missing piece of the puzzle?

ABSTRACT

Previous research has demonstrated that anxious individuals attend to negative emotional information at the expense of other information. This is commonly referred to as attentional bias. The field has historically conceived of this process as relatively static; however, research by [Zvielli, A., Bernstein, A., & Koster, E. H. W. (2014). Dynamics of attentional bias to threat in anxious adults: Bias towards and/or away? PLoS ONE, 9(8), e104025; Zvielli, A., Bernstein, A., & Koster, E. H. W. (2015). Temporal dynamics of attentional bias. Clinical Psychological Science, 3(5), 772–788.], and others, challenges this assumption by demonstrating considerable temporal variability in attentional bias amongst anxious individuals. Still, the mechanisms driving these temporal dynamics are less well known. Using a modified dot-probe task, the present study examined the impact of two relevant contextual variables- affective valence and trial repetition. Affective context was instantiated by the presentation of negative versus neutral pictures before each trial, while repetition context was achieved via the presentation of the valenced pictures in either a blocked- or mixed-trial design. Results indicate that individuals with higher trait-anxiety levels were significantly more influenced by blocked presentations of negative affective information, leading to greater temporal fluctuations in attentional bias. Furthermore, our findings provide additional evidence that attentional bias is best conceptualised as dynamic and variable, and that an individual’s affective experience is one factor that regulates attentional bias dynamics. Implications relating to theoretical and methodological factors are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Attentional bias
• attentional bias variability
• anxiety
• affective context

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Based on these criteria, 11 participants were excluded, with 2 reporting (a) un-corrected or impaired vision, 6 reporting of (b) neurological condition(s), 2 were indicative of (c) drug misuse, and 1 reported being on (d) anti-anxiety medication.

2. Several studies have found that complex IAPS images presented for as short as 100 ms can impact attentional processing (Carretié, Hinojosa, Martín-Loeches, Mercado, & Tapia, 2004). Importantly, ERP studies found that emotional valence differed in amplitude patterns at 160–220 ms, and arousal produced differed in amplitude patterns at 200–300 ms (Olofsson, Nordin, Sequeira, & Polich, 2008).

3. It is worth noting that out of the 22% of trials omitted due to these criteria, 4% of these omitted trials were due to error responses and 0.05% of excluded trials were due to invalid responses. The majority of the omitted trials (15%) were trials exceeding the RT cut-off of less than 200 ms.

4. Raw data for this study is publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/b3zet/.

5. The sample of normative and highly trait anxious individuals in Naim et al. (2015) had a mean trait anxiety score of 37.4, which is substantially lower than the mean trait anxiety score reported in our study (M = 46.5).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Research Award awarded to S.C.G (DE140101734).