Components of Attentional Bias to Threat in Clinically Anxious Children: An Experimental Study Using the Emotional Spatial Cueing Paradigm

Eye-tracking analysis of attentional disengagement in phobic and non-phobic individuals

This study investigated threat-related attention biases using a new visual search paradigm with eye tracking, which allows for measuring attentional disengagement in isolation. This is crucial as previous studies have been unable to distinguish between engagement, disengagement, and behavioral freezing. Thirty-three participants (Mage = 28.75 years, SD = 8.98; 21 women) with self-reported specific phobia (spiders, snakes, and pointed objects) and their matched controls (Mage = 28.38 years, SD = 8.66; 21 women) took part in the experiment. The participants were instructed to initially focus on a picture in the center of the screen, then search for a target picture in an outer circle consisting of six images, and respond via a button press whether the object in the target picture was oriented to the left or right. We found that phobic individuals show delayed disengagement and slower decision times compared with non-phobic individuals, regardless of whether the stimulus was threat-related or neutral. These results indicate that phobic individuals tend to exhibit poorer attentional control mechanisms and problems inhibiting irrelevant information. We also confirmed a threat-unrelated shared feature effect with complex stimuli (delayed disengagement when an attended stimulus and an unattended target share common stimulus features). This process might play a role in various experimental setups investigating attentional disengagement that has not yet been considered. These findings are important, as good attentional control may serve as a protective mechanism against anxiety disorders.

Auditory and cross-modal attentional bias toward positive natural sounds: Behavioral and ERP evidence

Recently, researchers have expanded the investigation into attentional biases toward positive stimuli; however, few studies have examined attentional biases toward positive auditory information. In three experiments, the present study employed an emotional spatial cueing task using emotional sounds as cues and auditory stimuli (Experiment 1) or visual stimuli (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3) as targets to explore whether auditory or visual spatial attention could be modulated by positive auditory cues. Experiment 3 also examined the temporal dynamics of cross-modal auditory bias toward positive natural sounds using event-related potentials (ERPs). The behavioral results of the three experiments consistently demonstrated that response times to targets were faster after positive auditory cues than they were after neutral auditory cues in the valid condition, indicating that healthy participants showed a selective auditory attentional bias (Experiment 1) and cross-modal attentional bias (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3) toward positive natural sounds. The results of Experiment 3 showed that N1 amplitudes were more negative after positive sounds than they were after neutral sounds, which further provided electrophysiological evidence that positive auditory information enhances attention at early stages in healthy adults. The results of the experiments performed in the present study suggest that humans exhibit an attentional bias toward positive natural sounds.

Don't look now! Emotion-induced blindness: The interplay between emotion and attention

Scientists have long been interested in understanding the influence of emotionally salient stimuli on attention and perception. One experimental paradigm that has shown great promise in demonstrating the effect of such stimuli is emotion-induced blindness. That is, when emotionally salient stimuli are presented in a rapid stream of stimuli, they produce impairments in the perception of task-relevant stimuli, even though they themselves are task irrelevant. This is known as emotion-induced blindness, and it is a profound and robust form of attentional bias. Here, we review the literature on emotion-induced blindness, such as identifying the types of stimuli that elicit it, and its temporal dynamics. We discuss the role of dimensional versus categorical approaches to emotion in relation to emotion-induced blindness. We also synthesize the work examining whether certain individuals, such as those high in anxiety versus psychopathy, succumb to emotion-induced blindness to different extents, and we discuss whether the deficit can be reduced or even abolished. We review the theoretical models that have been proposed to explain the phenomenon. Finally, we identify exciting questions for future research, and elucidate useful frameworks to guide future investigations.