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

Giuseppe Forte,Andrea Marotta,Esther Osariemen Oliha,Maria Casagrande,Francesca Favieri

doi:10.3390/brainsci11040480

Giuseppe Forte, Andrea Marotta + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11040480

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Abstract

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.

Highlights

Anxiety is an organic and psychological response, characterized by apprehension and increased surveillance in situations of uncertain danger or potential threats to the organism’s integrity [1,2]
attentional bias (AB) occurs when attention is preferentially directed toward an emotionally salient stimulus [11], and many studies have focused on the role it can play in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety [3,4]
Our findings show that fast detection of central interest changes, but not of marginal ones, was associated with high resting-state heart rate variability (HRV), both considering the time (RMSSD) and frequency domains (HF; low-frequency range (LF))

Summary

Introduction

Anxiety is an organic and psychological response, characterized by apprehension and increased surveillance in situations of uncertain danger or potential threats to the organism’s integrity [1,2]. Previous results on AB in anxiety are inconsistent [12]; some studies evidenced in high anxiety condition an AB toward threat stimuli, while other authors reported an AB away from threat stimuli [13,14,15] These inconsistencies could be due to both the difficulty in conceptualizing the attentional process of emotional information and the heterogeneity in the experimental designs used to evaluate AB. Investigations on AB in anxiety were influenced by (1) the paradigm adopted for its assessment (e.g., dot-probe paradigm); (2) the characteristics and nature of the stimuli (e.g., picture, words); (3) the samples’ characteristics (i.e., pathological samples, subclinical samples); and (4) the manipulation of variables (i.e., anxiety induction) [12]. To overcome these limitations and clarify the relationship between anxiety and AB, further studies are needed

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