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.

The rapid detection of facial expressions of anger or threat has obvious adaptive value. In this study, we examined the efficiency of facial processing by means of a visual search task. Participants searched displays of schematic faces and were required to determine whether the faces displayed were all the same or whether one was different. Four main results were found: (1) When displays contained the same faces, people were slower in detecting the absence of a discrepant face when the faces displayed angry (or sad/angry) rather than happy expressions. (2) When displays contained a discrepant face people were faster in detecting this when the discrepant face displayed an angry rather than a happy expression. (3) Neither of these patterns for same and different displays was apparent when face displays were inverted, or when just the mouth was presented in isolation. (4) The search slopes for angry targets were significantly lower than for happy targets. These results suggest that detection of angry facial expressions is fast and efficient, although does not "pop-out" in the traditional sense.

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 cue-target 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) threatrelated and ambiguous cues can influence the magnitude of the IOR effect.Many theories of attention assume that one of the primary functions of attentional mechanisms is to facilitate fast and accurate perception of objects appearing in the visual scene (e.g., Yantis, 1996). Likewise, a primary function of the basic emotion of fear is considered to be the facilitation of the detection of danger in the environment (e.g., LeDoux, 1996). It should not, therefore, be too surprising to find a close association between the brain mechanisms underlying attention and those underlying fear. Many psychological theories have examined attentional processing in people with disorders of the fear system (i.e., anxiety disorders) and concluded that attentional biases do play an important role in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders (e.g., Eysenck, 1992;Mathews & MacLeod, 1994; Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Matthews, 1988, 1997. Moreover, psychobiological research has shown that fear responses may well be driven by the pre-attentive analysis of stimuli as being threat-related (e.g., snakes, angry facial expressions), and that these mechanisms may then result in an automatic shift of attentional resources to the location of the threatening object (

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Psychological science relies on behavioral measures to assess cognitive processing; however, the field has not yet developed a tradition of routinely examining the reliability of these behavioral measures. Reliable measures are essential to draw robust inferences from statistical analyses, and subpar reliability has severe implications for measures’ validity and interpretation. Without examining and reporting the reliability of measurements used in an analysis, it is nearly impossible to ascertain whether results are robust or have arisen largely from measurement error. In this article, we propose that researchers adopt a standard practice of estimating and reporting the reliability of behavioral assessments of cognitive processing. We illustrate the need for this practice using an example from experimental psychopathology, the dot-probe task, although we argue that reporting reliability is relevant across fields (e.g., social cognition and cognitive psychology). We explore several implications of low measurement reliability and the detrimental impact that failure to assess measurement reliability has on interpretability and comparison of results and therefore research quality. We argue that researchers in the field of cognition need to report measurement reliability as routine practice so that more reliable assessment tools can be developed. To provide some guidance on estimating and reporting reliability, we describe the use of bootstrapped split-half estimation and intraclass correlation coefficients to estimate internal consistency and test-retest reliability, respectively. For future researchers to build upon current results, it is imperative that all researchers provide psychometric information sufficient for estimating the accuracy of inferences and informing further development of cognitive-behavioral assessments.

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We investigated whether a fearful expression enhances the effect of another's gaze in directing the attention of an observer. Participants viewed photographs of faces whose gaze was directed ahead, to the left or to the right. Target letters then appeared unpredictably to the left or right. As expected, targets in the location indicated by gaze were detected more rapidly. In nonanxious volunteers the effects of fearful gaze did not differ from neutral gaze, but fearful expression had a more powerful influence in a selected high anxious group. Attention is thus more likely to be guided by the direction of fearful than neutral gaze, but only in anxiety-prone individuals.Observing another's direction of gaze often results in a congruent focus of attention on the part of the observer. This effect emerges quite early in life, and has been noted in infants as young as 3 months (Hood, Willen, & Driver, 1998). When infants saw faces displayed on a computer whose eyes moved to the left or right, followed by a target stimulus on the same or the opposite side, saccades towards the target were faster if the observed gaze had been in the same direction. This early sensitivity to gaze direction was taken by the authors as consistent with the suggestion that detection of gaze is a biologically prepared ability, possibly controlled by a specialized brain module.In the experiment to be described here we investigated the influence of eye gaze in guiding attention in adult participants, with particular reference to the influence of facial expression displayed by the model, and the emotionality of the observer. As will be discussed later, we hypothesized that fearful gaze might be especially effective in guiding the attention of an observer to the same location, but particularly so in highly anxious individuals.We followed the general method described by a number of other researchers, albeit without reference to emotion. In an initial report by Friesen and Kingstone (1998), schematically drawn faces with blanked eyes were displayed centrally for 680 ms, after which the eye pupils appeared, apparently looking straight ahead, to the left or to the right. With a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 105, 300, 600, or 1005 ms, a target letter (F or T) appeared unpredictably but with equal frequency on the left or right side of the screen. For each SOA except the longest, detection times were significantly faster when targets were in the location consistent with gaze direction, despite instructions that eye gaze was not in fact predictive. There were no significant differences between the conditions when gaze was straight ahead and when targets appeared UKPMC Funders Group Author Manuscript UKPMC Funders Group Author Manuscriptin the gaze-incongruent location, at any SOA. That is, there were significant benefits of cueing by gaze direction with an SOA of 105-600 ms, but no significant costs when gaze and targets were in opposing locations.Two further series broadly confirming these findings were reported by Driver, Davis, Ricciard...

Background UK Biobank is a well-characterised cohort of over 500 000 participants including genetics, environmental data and imaging. An online mental health questionnaire was designed for UK Biobank participants to expand its potential. Aims Describe the development, implementation and results of this questionnaire. Method An expert working group designed the questionnaire, using established measures where possible, and consulting a patient group. Operational criteria were agreed for defining likely disorder and risk states, including lifetime depression, mania/hypomania, generalised anxiety disorder, unusual experiences and self-harm, and current post-traumatic stress and hazardous/harmful alcohol use. Results A total of 157 366 completed online questionnaires were available by August 2017. Participants were aged 45–82 (53% were ≥65 years) and 57% women. Comparison of self-reported diagnosed mental disorder with a contemporary study shows a similar prevalence, despite respondents being of higher average socioeconomic status. Lifetime depression was a common finding, with 24% (37 434) of participants meeting criteria and current hazardous/harmful alcohol use criteria were met by 21% (32 602), whereas other criteria were met by less than 8% of the participants. There was extensive comorbidity among the syndromes. Mental disorders were associated with a high neuroticism score, adverse life events and long-term illness; addiction and bipolar affective disorder in particular were associated with measures of deprivation. Conclusions The UK Biobank questionnaire represents a very large mental health survey in itself, and the results presented here show high face validity, although caution is needed because of selection bias. Built into UK Biobank, these data intersect with other health data to offer unparalleled potential for crosscutting biomedical research involving mental health.