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

Individual differences in emotion-induced blindness: Are they reliable and what do they measure?

The emotion-induced-blindness (EIB) paradigm has been extensively used to investigate attentional biases to emotionally salient stimuli. However, the low reliability of EIB scores (the difference in performance between the neutral and emotionally salient condition) limits the effectiveness of the paradigm for investigating individual differences. Here, across two studies, we investigated whether we could improve the reliability of EIB scores. In Experiment 1, we introduced a mid-intensity emotionally salient stimuli condition, with the goal of obtaining a wider range of EIB magnitudes to promote reliability. In Experiment 2, we sought to reduce the attentional oddball effect, so we created a modified EIB paradigm by removing the filler images. Neither of these approaches improved the reliability of the EIB scores. Reliability for the high- and mid-intensity EIB difference scores were low, while reliability of the scores for absolute performance (neutral, high-, and mid-intensity) were high and the scores were also highly correlated, even though overall performance in the emotionally salient conditions were significantly worse than in the neutral conditions. Given these results, we can conclude that while emotionally salient stimuli impair performance in the EIB task compared with the neutral condition, the strong correlation between the emotionally salient and neutral conditions means that while EIB can be used to investigate individual differences in attentional control, it is not selective to individual differences in attentional biases to emotionally salient stimuli.

The remediating effect of Attention Bias Modification on aggression in young offenders with antisocial tendency: A randomized controlled trial

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

An attention bias toward hostile stimuli is associated with an increased risk of aggressive behavior. Thus, reducing hostile attention bias may help to reduce aggression in young offenders. We evaluated the remediating effects of Attention Bias Modification (ABM) on hostile attention bias and aggressive behavior in Chinese male young offenders with antisocial tendencies.

METHODS

Institutionalized male young offenders (ages 16-18) were recruited and randomly assigned to ABM (n = 28), placebo (n = 28), or waiting list (n = 28). The ABM group received four weeks of training using visual search of emotional faces; the placebo group underwent similar training using visual search of neutral objects. Before and after treatment, aggressive behavior, attention bias toward positive stimuli and hostile stimuli were assessed.

RESULTS

Linear mixed models and hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that the intervention effect of ABM was moderated by participants' initial attention bias. Young offenders with a high level of initial hostile attention bias, or with a low level of initial positive attention bias, benefitted most from ABM.

LIMITATIONS

The small sample size impedes investigation of the mechanism of the intervention's effects. Further research can determine whether the current results can be extrapolated to the population of female young offenders.

CONCLUSION

The results of the present study suggest that ABM is helpful for young offenders who show the greatest bias toward hostile stimuli and away from positive stimuli. These findings highlight the importance of matching the intervention and the participant.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

osf.io/vj5rk.

Attentional variability and avoidance of hostile stimuli decrease aggression in Chinese male juvenile delinquents

BACKGROUND

As a prominent issue worldwide, juveniles' aggressive and violent crimes have attracted much interest in recent years. Based on the social information processing model, the present study aimed to evaluate the Chinese male juvenile delinquents' attention bias towards hostile stimuli from both static and dynamic perspectives. Additionally, the predictive effect of attention bias on aggressive behavior and the moderating effect of group (juvenile delinquents and the controls with no criminal history) were also investigated.

METHODS

The hostile attention bias and aggressive behavior of 76 juvenile delinquents (M_age = 17.5 years, SD = 0.59 years) and 67 controls (M_age = 18.3 years, SD = 0.73 years) were measured with the emotional dot-probe task, emotional Stroop task, and the Chinese version of the Buss & Perry aggression questionnaire, respectively.

RESULTS

The results showed that compared with controls, juvenile delinquents showed more attention biases towards hostile faces and words, and demonstrated higher levels of physical aggression and anger. Furthermore, the type of participants moderated the relationship between hostile attention bias and aggressive behavior. For juvenile delinquents, attention bias away from hostile stimuli and attention variability negatively predicted anger, while for controls, attention variability positively predicted self-directed aggression.

CONCLUSION

Attentional variability and avoidance of hostile stimuli are expected to reduce the aggressive level of Chinese male juvenile delinquents. The relationship between attention bias and aggression should be further considered and applied in the clinical practice.

Anxiety and Attentional Processes: The Role of Resting Heart Rate Variability

Individuals with high anxiety preferentially focus attention on emotional information. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) plays an important role in modulating both anxiety and attentional processes. Despite many studies having evaluated attentional bias in anxious people, few of them have investigated the change blindness phenomenon associated with the attentional response toward salient stimuli, considering the role of the ANS. This study aimed to examine the role of heart rate variability (HRV) in trait anxiety and top-down and bottom-up attentional processes toward emotional stimuli. Seventy-five healthy university students were divided into high (N = 39) and low (N = 36) trait anxiety groups and completed a change detection flicker task with neutral, positive, and negative stimuli. The results evidenced a different attentional pattern between people with high and low anxiety considering both the two attentional processes and the valence of the stimuli. Specifically, individuals with high anxiety showed a bias in elaborating emotional stimuli related to their salience (i.e., negative stimuli were faster elaborated than neutral and positive stimuli when top-down attentional mechanisms were involved, while slower performances were highlighted considering bottom-up attentional mechanisms in response to emotional stimuli compared to neutral stimuli). Moreover, an association between HRV, trait anxiety levels, and change blindness phenomenon was confirmed. These results underline the role of HRV as a possible predictor of the alteration of attentional mechanism in anxiety.

Standardizing measurement in psychological studies: On why one second has different value in a sprint versus a marathon

Here we highlight the importance of considering relative performance and the standardization of measurement in psychological research. In particular, we highlight three key analytic issues. The first is the fact that the popular method of calculating difference scores can be misleading because current approaches rely on absolute differences, neglecting what proportion of baseline performance this change reflects. We propose a simple solution of dividing absolute differences by mean levels of performance to calculate a relative measure, much like a Weber fraction from psychophysics. The second issue we raise is that there is an increasing need to compare the variability of effects across studies. The standard deviation score (SD) represents the average amount by which scores differ from their mean, but is sensitive to units, and to where a distribution lies along a measure even when the units are common. We propose two simple solutions to calculate a truly standardized SD (SSD), one for when the range of possible scores is known (e.g., scales, accuracy), and one for when it is unknown (e.g., reaction time). The third and final issue we address is the importance of considering relative performance in applying exclusion criteria to screen overly slow reaction time scores from distributions.

State anxiety reduces working memory capacity but does not impact filtering cost for neutral distracters

Current theories propose that anxiety adversely impacts working memory (WM) by restricting WM capacity and interfering with efficient filtering of task-irrelevant information. The current study investigated the effect of shock-induced state anxiety on WM capacity and the ability to filter task-irrelevant neutral stimuli. We measured the contralateral delay activity (CDA), an event-related potential that indexes the number of items maintained in WM, while participants completed a lateralized change detection task. The task included low and high WM loads, as well as a low load plus distracter condition. This design was used to assess WM capacity for low and high loads and investigate an individual's ability to filter neutral task-irrelevant stimuli. Participants completed the task under two conditions, threat of shock and safe. We observed a reduced CDA in the threat compared to the safe condition that was specific for high memory load. However, we did not find any differences in CDA filtering cost between threat and safe conditions. In addition, we did not find any differences in behavioral performance between the threat and safe conditions. These findings suggest that being in an anxious state reduces the neural representation for large amounts of information in WM, but have little effect on the filtering of neutral distracters.

Temporal trends in attention disengagement from social threat as a function of social anxiety

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Difficulty disengaging attention from threat has been observed in some anxious samples, but the evidence to date is mixed. The current study examines temporal trends in attention disengagement and compares this construct across multiple forms of social threat.

METHODS

Participants (85 adults with a principal diagnosis of social anxiety disorder) completed a spatial cueing task with four image categories (angry faces, disapproving faces, neutral faces, neutral objects). Attention disengagement was assessed via reaction time (RT) over 256 trials.

RESULTS

Participants with greater social anxiety exhibited an initial delay in attention disengagement from disapproving faces that habituated over the course of the task. RTs to angry and neutral stimuli did not differ as a function of social anxiety.

LIMITATIONS

The current task only allowed for examining speed of attention disengagement, and thus we were unable to compare our results to trajectories of speed at which participants orient towards threat. Additionally, disapproving facial images were created for this paradigm and may benefit from further validation.

CONCLUSIONS

Findings suggest that social anxiety is associated with an initial delay in attention disengagement from social threat that resolves over the course of repeated exposures to such stimuli. Treatment implications are discussed.

Social anxiety and attentional bias variability: electrophysiological evidence of attentional control deficits

Attentional control has an important role in attentional bias in social anxiety. This study aimed to investigate whether attentional bias in social anxiety was caused by attentional control deficit. Event-related potentials and behavioural attentional bias index (trial-level attentional bias variability) were recorded as participants completed the dot-probe task. The behaviour result showed that compared with the low socially anxious individuals, the high socially anxious individuals had a marginally higher score of attentional bias variability. For event-related potentials results, target-locked frontocentral N2 amplitude was significantly larger under the incongruent condition than the congruent condition in the low socially anxious group, whereas there was no significant difference between these two conditions in the high socially anxious group. The low socially anxious group also exhibited reduced target-locked P2 amplitude from the congruent condition to the incongruent condition. Our findings provide electrophysiological evidence of attentional control dysregulation in socially anxious individuals, which contributes to modifying social anxiety-related attentional bias.

Searching for emotion: A top-down set governs attentional orienting to facial expressions

Research indicates that humans orient attention toward facial expressions of emotion. Orienting to facial expressions has typically been conceptualised as due to bottom-up attentional capture. However, this overlooks the contributions of top-down attention and selection history. In the present study, across four experiments, these three attentional processes were differentiated using a variation of the dot-probe task, in which participants were cued to attend to a happy or angry face on each trial. Results show that attention toward facial expressions was not exclusively driven by bottom-up attentional capture; instead, participants could shift their attention toward both happy and angry faces in a top-down manner. This effect was not found when the faces were inverted, indicating that top-down attention relies on holistic processing of the face. In addition, no evidence of selection history was found (i.e., no improvement on repeated trials or blocks of trials in which the task was to orient to the same expression). Altogether, these results suggest that humans can use top-down attentional control to rapidly orient attention to emotional faces.

Attentional Avoidance of Historically Relevant, Task-Irrelevant Facial Affect: Past Depression, Interpersonal Characteristics, and Ethnicity

Experiential background can influence how individuals respond to affective interpersonal information. For formerly depressed individuals, sad facial expressions are presumably salient. If so, when performing affectively neutral daily tasks, these individuals would find peripheral sad faces particularly distracting, and thus, they might shift their attention from them. The present study examined this hypothesis by comparing how euthymic formerly depressed and never depressed adults attended to sad and happy task-irrelevant emotional facial expression stimuli. The study also measured constructs linked to interpersonal functioning and depression and conducted exploratory analyses to examine whether Hispanic ethnicity status would moderate effects of study outcomes. Results of analyses indicated that formerly depressed individuals directed more attention away from sad faces than never depressed individuals. There were no significant between-group effects for happy faces and no moderation by ethnicity on attention to affective faces. However, irrespective of depression history, Hispanic individuals reported lower fear of negative evaluation compared to non-Hispanic Caucasian individuals. Findings are in line with hypothesized attentional avoidance among formerly depressed individuals and consistent with prior research suggesting that some Hispanic individuals experience protective mental health benefits through engagement with aspects of their culture. Directions for future research are discussed.

Translating experimental paradigms into individual-differences research: Contributions, challenges, and practical recommendations

Psychological science has long been cleaved by a fundamental divide between researchers who experimentally manipulate variables and those who measure existing individual-differences. Increasingly, however, researchers are appreciating the value of integrating these approaches. Here, we used visual attention research as a case-in-point for how this gap can be bridged. Traditionally, researchers have predominately adopted experimental approaches to investigating visual attention. Increasingly, however, researchers are integrating individual-differences approaches with experimental approaches to answer novel and innovative research questions. However, individual differences research challenges some of the core assumptions and practices of experimental research. The purpose of this review, therefore, is to provide a timely summary and discussion of the key issues. While these are contextualised in the field of visual attention, the discussion of these issues has implications for psychological research more broadly. In doing so, we provide eight practical recommendations for proposed solutions and novel avenues for research moving forward.