To Approach or to Avoid: The Role of Ambivalent Motivation in Attentional Biases to Threat and Spider Fear

Abstract

Background People with anxiety difficulties show different patterns in their deployment of attention to threat compared to people without anxiety difficulties. These attentional biases are assumed to play a critical role in the development and persistence of anxiety. However, little is known about factors that influence attentional biases to threat. An emerging body of evidence suggests that visual attention to threat varies across the time course according to one's motivation to approach vs. avoid threat. Methods In order to better understand the relationship between motivation, attentional biases to threat, and anxiety, we had participants high in spider fear complete a sustained-attention task in full view of a live tarantula while their eye movements were tracked. Results Participants who were ambivalent about whether to look at the spider or to avoid looking exhibited a unique pattern of visual attention to the spider, and reported higher spider fear and more negative affect than did other participants at the end of the study. Conclusions Our findings suggest that anxiety persistence may have more to do with goal prioritization than innate attentional biases. Future studies of attentional biases to threat should take motivation into account and study attention across the time course. Ambivalent motivation to threat should also be targeted in exposure therapy.

Visual attention to threat during stove-checking in people high in checking behaviour

“…The purpose of this study was to examine participants' need to attend to threat and to avoid attending to threat during a checking task, to explore whether the need to attend versus avoid mapped onto actual viewing patterns, and to determine whether need to attend and visual attention to threat influenced post-check certainty. Consistent with Nelson et al (2015) and Xu et al (2021) the correlation between motivation to attend to and avoid attending to threat stimuli was quite low (in our case non-significant) in both groups suggesting ambivalence about whether to attend or to avoid. As hypothesized, we found that those with checking concerns (HCC)…”

“…However, our fourth hypothesis -that greater need to avoid threat would predict greater post-check certainty -was not supported. This hypothesis was based on Nelson et al (2015) and Xu et al (2021) who found that people have the capacity to avoid looking at threat when motivated to do so. Bucarelli and Purdon (2016) found that people with OCD looked less at threat objects than did anxious controls, but their control group comprised people with a ATTENTION TO THREAT DURING CHECKING 20 diagnosis of GAD who may have been more threat sensitive than the control group in the current study.…”

“…The ambivalent group were higher in trait anxiety than the avoider and indifferent groups. Xu, Rowe, and Purdon (2021) tracked eye movements of participants high in spider fear while they completed an attentionally demanding task with a live tarantula in a terrarium with a dislodged lid in ready view. At 12 random points during the task participants were asked to rate how motivated they were to look at the spider and how motivated they were to avoid looking at the spider.…”