Abstract
By combining binocular suppression technique and a probe detection paradigm, we investigated attentional bias to invisible stimuli and its gender difference in both high trait anxiety (HTA) and low trait anxiety (LTA) individuals. As an attentional cue, happy or fearful face pictures were presented to HTAs and LTAs for 800 ms either consciously or unconsciously (through binocular suppression). Participants were asked to judge the orientation of a gabor patch following the face pictures. Their performance was used to measure attentional effect induced by the cue. We found gender differences of attentional effect only in the unconscious condition with HTAs. Female HTAs exhibited difficulty in disengaging attention from the location where fearful faces were presented, while male HTAs showed attentional avoidance of it. Our results suggested that the failure to find attentional avoidance of threatening stimuli in many previous studies might be attributed to consciously presented stimuli and data analysis regardless of participants' gender. These findings also contributed to our understanding of gender difference in anxiety disorder.
Highlights
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is an anxiety disorder that is characterized by excessive, uncontrollable and often irrational worry about everyday things, which is disproportionate to the actual source of worry [1]
Those with a top 5% score were selected as High Trait Anxiety participants (HTAs) and those with a bottom 5% score were selected as Low Trait Anxiety participants (LTAs)
A 26262 mixed-design ANOVA, with face emotion as within-subject variable, and anxiety state (HTA/LTA) and gender as between-subject variables, revealed only a attentional effect was dependent on anxiety state
Summary
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is an anxiety disorder that is characterized by excessive, uncontrollable and often irrational worry about everyday things, which is disproportionate to the actual source of worry [1]. Researchers usually adopted patients with generalized anxiety disorder as clinical sample and individuals with high trait anxiety as subclinical sample [2]. Cognitive theories about generalized anxiety disorders propose that patients or HTA individuals have cognitive vulnerabilities at the level of attentive processing of threat that may maintain anxiety, and may even lead to the development of clinical anxiety disorders [3,4]. HTA individuals initially attend to threat, but this is often followed by attentional avoidance of threat. This pattern of vigilance and avoidance is hypothesized to maintain anxiety [9]
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