Generalized anxiety disorder and selective attention: An unsuccessful replication of Yiend et al., (2015) in a student population

Abstract

ABSTRACT Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is an anxiety disorder that is believed to affect attention (Stein, M. B., & Sareen, J. (2015). Generalized anxiety disorder. New England Journal of Medicine, 373(21), 2059–2068. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMcp1502514; Yiend, J., Mathews, A., Burns, T., Dutton, K., Fernández-Martín, A., Georgiou, G. A., Luckie, M., Rose, A., Russo, R., & Fox, E. (2015). Mechanisms of selective attention in generalized anxiety disorder. Clinical Psychological Science, 3(5), 758–771. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702614545216). Previous literature has found that selective attention is changed when someone perceives threatening stimuli, such as an angry face, and that those with anxiety disorders, may have a heightened or delayed response to threatening stimuli (Richards, H. J., Benson, V., Donnelly, N., & Hadwin, J. A. (2014). Exploring the function of selective attention and hypervigilance for threat in anxiety. Clinical Psychology Review, 34(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2013.10.006; Stevens, C., & Bavelier, D. (2012). The role of selective attention on academic foundations: A cognitive neuroscience perspective. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 2, S30–S48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2011.11.001), which may alter how fast a presented task is completed (Yiend et al., 2015). The present study aimed to reproduce findings by Yiend et al. (2015), which identified an unexpected pattern in those with GAD: faster disengagement from angry faces compared to positive (happy, neutral) faces. The present study recruited a larger (nonclinical) sample from a student population to achieve greater statistical power. None of the findings reported by Yiend and colleagues (Experiment 1; 2015) were replicated in a student sample. The implications are discussed.