Do Threatening Stimuli Draw or Hold Visual Attention in Subclinical Anxiety?

By E. Fox, Riccardo Russo, R. J. Bowles, Kevin Dutton. Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2001

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Biases in information processing undoubtedly play an important role in the maintenance of emotion and emotional disorders. In an attentional cueing paradigm, threat words and angry faces had no advantage over positive or neutral words (or faces) in attracting attention to their own location, even for people who were highly state-anxious. In contrast, the presence of threatening cues (words and faces) had a strong impact on the disengagement of attention. When a threat cue was presented and a target subsequently presented in another location, high state-anxious individuals took longer to detect the target relative to when either a positive or a neutral cue was presented. It is concluded that threat-related stimuli affect attentional dwell time and the disengage component of attention, leaving the question of whether threat stimuli affect the shift component of attention open to debate.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5cf71a1712b0e222ae87e833504297e59d4a9be2

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Citations in the corpus

Emotional activation in the first and second language (2007, background): “Another explanation for the emotional interference is that threatening stimuli prevent the disengagement of attention (see Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton, 2001 ).”
Theories and measurement of visual attentional processing in anxiety (2008, background): “…hypothesis proposes that clinically anxious persons do not orient more rapidly to anxiety-inducing stimuli, but rather have their attention maintained by threat-relevant stimuli, such that they disengage from them more slowly (Derryberry & Reed, 2002; Fox et al., 2000, 2001; Yiend & Mathews, 2001).”
Faces capture attention: Evidence from inhibition of return (2006, background): “Moreover, these effects are stronger for angry relative to happy faces (eg., Fox et al., 2001).”
Facilitated detection of angry faces: Initial orienting and processing efficiency (2006, background): “Second, the potential limitation in the generalisability of the data obtained with schematic faces is probably not critical, as an equivalent attentional pattern has been found for real and schematic faces in some tasks (Fox et al., 2001), thus confirming that schematic faces can be used as an analo”
Individual Differences in Heart Rate Variability Predict the Degree of Slowing during Response Inhibition and Initiation in the Presence of Emotional Stimuli (2011, positive): “One explanation after the presentation of emotional stimuli is an attentional allocation toward emotional stimuli (Fox et al., 2001; Vuilleu-mier, 2005; Wyble et al., 2008; see also Estes and Verges, 2008 a description of alternative explanations).”
The illusion of courage in social predictions: Underestimating the impact of fear of embarrassment on other people ! (2005, positive): “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).”
The effects of emotion on attention: A review of attentional processing of emotional information (2010, background): “Fox, Russo, Bowles, and Dutton ( 2001 ) and Yiend and Mathews ( 2001 ) were among the first to find support for the biased disengagement of attention using peripheral cuing (see also an earlier study by Derryberry & Reed, 1994 ).”
Angry faces hold the eyes (2011, background): “Fox and colleagues (Fox et al., 2001) presented faces (angry, happy, or neutral) or words (threatening, positive, or neutral) as exogenous cues.”
The Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces: A validation study (2008, methodology): “Researchers often use schematic faces (eg, Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton, 2001 ) or computerised faces (eg, Schultz et al, 2000 ) of which the ecological validity may be questioned.”
The involvement of distinct visual channels in rapid attention towards fearful facial expressions (2005, background): “Overall, our experiments suggest that information at coarse spatial scales is crucial for rapid extraction and enhanced attentional processing of emotional cues, but not for more sustained attentional processing of fearful expressions (cf. Bradley, Mogg, Falla, & Hamilton, 1998; Fox et al., 2001).”
Electrophysiological correlates of rapid spatial orienting towards fearful faces. (2004, positive): “…invalid trials rather than faster on valid trials, consistent with the recent proposal that emotional stimuli might produce a difficulty in disengaging attention from their location (Fox et al., 2001), rather than just a facilitation in orienting there (Mogg and Bradley, 1999; Mogg et al., 2000).”