Attentional bias towards negative stimuli in healthy individuals and the effects of trait anxiety

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the time course of attentional bias for negative information in healthy individuals and to assess the associated influence of trait anxiety. Thirty-eight healthy volunteers performed an emotional dot-probe task with pairs of negative and neutral scenes, presented for either 1 or 2 s and followed by a target placed at the previous location of either negative or neutral stimulus. Analyses included eye movements during the presentation of the scenes and response times associated with target localization. In a second step, analyses focused on the influence of trait anxiety. While there was no significant difference at the behavioral level, the eye-tracking data revealed that negative information held longer attention than neutral stimuli once fixated. This initial maintenance bias towards negative pictures then increased with increasing trait anxiety. However, at later processing stages, only individuals with the highest trait anxiety appeared to fixate longer on negative pictures than neutral pictures, individuals with low trait anxiety showing the opposite pattern. This study provides novel evidence that healthy individuals display an attentional maintenance bias towards negative stimuli, which is associated with trait anxiety. Vision, like the other sensory systems, is constrained by its limited capacity of processing. Attention allows coping with this issue by selecting specific information within our rich and complex environment that will benefit from more elaborate processing and access to consciousness. The properties of the retina also constrain visual perception by limiting high-resolution processing to the fovea, which covers only the central 2° of visual angle. In naturalistic viewing, attentional selection relies on eye movements allowing to bring visual stimuli onto the fovea 1. Overt attention is functionally coupled to, and share neural mechanisms with 2-4 , covert attention that improves perception at a specific visual location without gaze reorienting but also guides eye movements 5-10. Attentional selection is also supposed to operate according to two complementary and interacting processes 11-14. The reflexive or exogenous attention is a fast, bottom-up (stimulus-driven) process that selects stimuli according to their physical features or because they are novel or unexpected. The voluntary or endogenous attention is a slower, top-down (goal-driven) process selecting stimuli that are expected or relevant to current goals. It is also increasingly recognized that emotionally laden stimuli, given their strong adaptive significance, benefit from preferential processing over neutral stimuli 15,16. The exact nature of the mechanisms responsible for this effect remains open to debate, in particular regarding the degree to which they differ from classical attention mechanisms 17,18. However, evidence suggests that "emotional attention" also involves a balance between bottom-up and top-down processes 17,19. The valence-related salience of a stimulus may thus depend on internal...

Housing and personality effects on judgement and attention biases in dairy cows

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“…Unlike Activity, both Fearfulness and Sociability influenced attention bias in the reference conditions. In humans and farm animals, certain underlying traits, like trait anxiety, have also been associated with sustained attention to threat 14 , 15 , 46 and with longer latencies to engage with positive stimuli 47 . In our conditions, fearful heifers were more biased towards the threat than the bucket (i.e.…”

The Effects of Emotional Working Memory Training on Trait Anxiety

“…Moreover, individuals with high trait anxiety maintain their attention toward threatening stimuli significantly longer than do individuals with low trait anxiety ( Williams et al, 1988 ). A viable explanation for this would be that individuals with trait anxiety have less attentional control resources to be able to minimize disruption, interference, and fixation from irrelevant but emotionally-charged stimuli ( Veerapa et al, 2020 ). Indeed, impaired attentional processes have been identified as among the primary cognitive factors underlying not only the development, but also the maintenance of trait anxiety ( Eysenck et al, 2007 ).…”

Monitoring and Evaluation of Emotion Regulation by Aerobic Exercise and Motor Imagery Based on Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

“…The rapid development of society has placed a certain amount of pressure on individuals or groups, which can trigger different degrees of anxiety or depression. If individuals do not pay attention to emotion regulation, physical, and mental illnesses may occur, with severe ones capable of leading to mental dysfunction or adverse social events (Veerapa et al, 2020 ). Aerobic exercise is one option to improve the mood and promote the generation of positive emotions (Brush et al, 2020 ) that can be used by people with severe anxiety for emotion regulation (Tempest and Parfitt, 2013 ).…”

“…Meanwhile, the pleasant, comfortable, or energetic experience of motor imagery may also further promote the regulation of emotion (Tempest and Parfitt, 2013 ), but its regulatory effect on motion is still unclear. Therefore, in the study, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) brain imaging was used to monitor and evaluate the effect of aerobic exercise and motor imagery on emotion regulation (Jiang et al, 2017 ; Veerapa et al, 2020 ).…”