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.

Highlights

  • 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

  • Trait anxiety, which constitutes a vulnerability to affective ­disorders[28,29], is supposed to be associated with a preferential selection of aversive stimuli over neutral cues so that individuals with high trait anxiety, unlike those with low trait anxiety, would present with attentional bias (AB) to t­ hreat[19,30, 31]

  • The meta-analysis on threat-related AB performed by Bar-Haim et al.[30], which included numerous dot-probe studies, found that individuals suffering from an anxiety disorder or with high trait anxiety, but not non-anxious persons, show an AB towards threat-related stimuli of comparable magnitude

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Summary

Introduction

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. Studies designed to assess the time-course of AB for threatening stimuli with different exposure durations led to mixed results: while the study by Mogg et al.[38] found no effect of exposure duration, others evidenced increased vigilance in individuals with high trait anxiety only for a short exposure duration (500 ms)[37,39,40], sometimes followed by avoidance with increasing exposure t­ime[40] It appears, that AB for aversive stimuli operates at an early attentional stage, whereas evidence is less clear regarding the maintenance of attention

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