Intolerance of uncertainty is associated with reduced attentional inhibition in the absence of direct threat

Abstract

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is a dispositional tendency to find uncertain situations aversive. There is limited understanding as to how IU may bias attention to uncertainty in the absence of direct threat. Here we examined the extent to which uncertain distractors and individual differences in IU impacted eye-movements during an attentional capture task. Participants were asked to move their eyes towards a target, whilst ignoring an array of distractors. An additional distractor could appear before or after the target in a near or far location from the target. We observed high IU individuals to display fewer first saccades to the target in all conditions. The results were specific to IU, over trait anxiety. Overall, these results suggest that IU modulates attention to uncertainty in the absence of direct threat. Such findings inform the conceptualisation of IU and its relation to psychopathology.