Attentional Bias for Threat: Evidence for Delayed Disengagement from Emotional Faces

By E. Fox, Riccardo Russo, Kevin Dutton. Cognition & Emotion, 2002

1,038 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The present paper reports three new experiments suggesting that the valence of a face cue can influence attentional effects in a cueing paradigm. Moreover, heightened trait anxiety resulted in increased attentional dwell-time on emotional facial stimuli, relative to neutral faces. Experiment 1 presented a cueing task, in which the cue was either an “angry”, “happy”, or “neutral” facial expression. Targets could appear either in the same location as the face (valid trials) or in a different location to the face (invalid trials). Participants did not show significant variations across the different cue types (angry, happy, neutral) in responding to a target on valid trials. However, the valence of the face did affect response times on invalid trials. Specifically, participants took longer to respond to a target when the face cue was “angry” or “happy” relative to neutral. In Experiment 2, the cuetarget stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was increased and an overall inhibition of return (IOR) effect was found (i.e., slower responses on valid trials). However, the “angry” face cue eliminated the IOR effect for both high and low trait anxious groups. In Experiment 3, threat-related and jumbled facial stimuli reduced the magnitude of IOR for high, but not for low, trait-anxious participants. These results suggest that: (i) attentional bias in anxiety may reflect a difficulty in disengaging from threat-related and emotional stimuli, and (ii) threat-related and ambiguous cues can influence the magnitude of the IOR effect.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17c4b813d3607a9c883e7fa59a631d254fe8ecdd

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Citations in the corpus

Mechanisms of Attentional Biases towards Threat in the Anxiety Disorders: An Integrative Review (2009, background): “One of the emerging lines of inquiry in attentional bias in anxiety disorder research is the investigation of the components of attentional bias (Cisler et al., 2009; Fox et al., 2001, 2002; Koster, Crombez, Verschuere, et al., 2004).”
Anxiety, Processing Efficiency, and Cognitive Performance New Developments from Attentional Control Theory (2009, background): “, Fox , Russo , and Dutton ( 2002 ) and Mathews and Mackintosh ( 1998 ) .”
The Paranoid Optimist: An Integrative Evolutionary Model of Cognitive Biases (2006, background): “For example, Fox, Russo, and Dutton (2002) showed that angry faces capture attention for longer than happy or neutral faces, even when participants are trying to ignore them.”
Anxiety and cognitive performance: attentional control theory. (2007, methodology): “Fox et al. (2002) showed that the attentional bias associated with anxiety depends mainly on the difficulty anxious individuals have in disengaging from threatrelated stimuli.”
Eye tracking of attention in the affective disorders: a meta-analytic review and synthesis. (2012, background): “However, some studies have found increased attention to positive stimuli in anxiety (e.g., Fox et al., 2001, exp. 3; Fox et al., 2002, exp. 1).”
Angry faces hold the eyes (2011, methodology): “In a follow-up study (Fox et al., 2002), the delayed disengagement hypothesis was further investigated using the phenomenon of inhibition of return (IOR).”
Attention to Threat in Anxiety-prone Individuals: Mechanisms Underlying Attentional Bias (2006, background): “Most studies indicate that attentional bias to threat in HTA individuals is caused by problematic disengagement of attention from threat ( Fox, Russo, & Dutton, 2002; Yiend & Mathews, 2001).”
The illusion of courage in social predictions: Underestimating the impact of fear of embarrassment on other people ! (2005, background): “Emotional arousal, particularly of negative aVect such as fear and anxiety, narrows attention (Basso, ScheVt, Ris, & Dember, 1996; Derryberry, 1993; Derryberry & Reed, 1998) and inhibits attention to non-emotional information (Fox, Russo, & Bowles, 2001; Fox, Russo, & Dutton, 2002).”
Theories and measurement of visual attentional processing in anxiety (2008, background): “…to controls, high trait-anxious participants showed longer response times for detecting targets following invalid angry face cues (Fox et al., 2001), general threat pictures (Koster, Crombez, Verschuere, Van Damme, & Wiersema, 2006; Yiend & Mathews, 2001), and emotional faces (Fox et al., 2002).”
Preattentive face processing: What do visual search experiments with schematic faces tell us? (2007, methodology): “The inconclusive evidence for preattentive discrimination of facial affect in the present experiments replicates previous results by Fox et al. (2000), Nothdurft (1993), and Öhman et al.”