Traits, states, and attentional gates: Temperament and threat relevance as predictors of attentional bias to social threat

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of situational and dispositional factors on attentional biases toward social threat, and the impact of these attentional biases on distress in a sample of adolescents. Results suggest greater biases for personally-relevant threat cues, as individuals reporting high social stress were vigilant to subliminal social threat cues, but not physical threat cues, and those reporting low social stress showed no attentional biases. Individual differences in fearful temperament and attentional control interacted to influence attentional biases, with fearful temperament predicting biases to supraliminal social threat only for individuals with poor attentional control. Multivariate analyses exploring relations between attentional biases for social threat and symptoms of anxiety and depression revealed that attentional biases alone were rarely related to symptoms. However, biases did interact with social stress, fearful temperament, and attentional control to predict distress. Results are discussed in terms of automatic and effortful cognitive mechanisms underlying threat cue processing. Keywords attentional bias; temperament; social stress; subliminal; supraliminal; dot probe Attentional allocation involves a rich network of automatic and volitional processes, which may be influenced by both situational factors and individual differences (Gilboa-Schechtman, Revelle, & Gotlib, 2000;Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2004;MacLeod, Rutherford, Campbell, Ebsworthy, & Holker, 2002;Matthews & Wells, 2000). Hundreds of studies have investigated relations between state or trait anxiety and attentional biases, demonstrating a consistent link between anxiety and vigilance to threat. Temperament traits involving sensitivity to threat (e.g., negative affectivity, trait anxiety) are associated with automatic allocation of attention to threat (Derryberry & Reed, 2002;, and are strongly linked to symptoms of anxiety and depression (Rothbart, Posner, & Hershey, 1995; Compas, ConnorSmith, & Jaser, 2004;Muris, de Jong, & Engelen, 2004), bolstering the notion that threat cue vigilance is problematic. Although vigilance to threat is often discussed as a potential cause of anxiety, attentional biases may also be a response to anxiety or stress, as individuals are more likely to be vigilant to threat cues relevant to current concerns. For example, women with Address correspondence to Erik Helzer, Cornell University, Department of Psychology, 211 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853. E-mail: egh42@cornell.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptAnxiety Stress Coping. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 January 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript cancer are vigilant to supraliminal cancer threat words (Glinder, Beckjord, Kaiser, & Compas, 2007), and children with chronic abdominal pain are vigilant to subliminal pain threat words (Boyer, Compas, Stanger, Colletti, Konik, Morrow, & Thomsen, 2006), while neither group is vigilant to social threat words. Despite links between ...

Working memory regulates trait anxiety-related threat processing biases.

“…This builds on the work of Salemink and Wiers (2012) by showing that a within-participants experimental manipulation of executive control capacity (WM load) moderates trait anxiety's effects on interpretive bias, and supports the hypothesis that latent emotion-related biases influence cognition more when available executive control resources are scarce (Hofmann et al, 2008;Salemink & Wiers, 2012 It is not necessarily surprising that interpretive bias effects were only found with social threat items. The participants were students at a small private university; their age and socio-economic status may make social threats more of an everyday concern than the threat of violence or illness (see Helzer et al, 2009;Mathews & MacLeod, 1985). Since we completed the study, informal questioning of some of these students has confirmed that most are much more concerned about 'social death' than they are about actual death, perhaps due to their relatively privileged status in Istanbul society.…”

Attentional bias towards threatening stimuli in children with anxiety: A meta-analysis

“…Data extracted could include attentional bias indices, correlations between an anxiety measure and an attentional bias score, or within-group statistics such as t-values. In three cases (Broerena, Murisa, Bouwmeestera, Field, & Voerman, 2011;Helzer, Connor-Smith, & Reed, 2009;Telzer et al, 2008) a beta-weight was reported. This was converted to a correlation coefficient using a formula described by Peterson and Brown (2005), and included in the between-groups analysis.…”

Selective Attention to Threat in Childhood Anxiety: Evidence from Visual Probe Paradigms

“…Taghavi et al, 1999) or short (masked) periods (e.g. Helzer, Connor-Smith and Reed, 2009) and in those studies that have attempted to tailor stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) to childrens' pre-test reading performance (Schippell et al, 2003).…”