Mayer Birgit, Muris Peter, Vogel Laura, Nojoredjo Irina, Merckelbach Harald
Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
J Anxiety Disord. 2006;20(4):510-9. doi: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2005.05.001. Epub 2005 Jun 13.
Features of threatening stimuli are proposed to be processed fast and automatically, as they call for immediate attention. Phobic patients typically exhibit these attentional biases for stimuli that are relevant for their particular type of fear. In the present study, it was examined whether a change detection paradigm can be used to study attentional bias for fear-related stimuli. Twenty-five spider-fearful and 25 non-fearful participants were confronted with a series of pictures, in which sometimes a spider gradually appeared, sometimes a fear-irrelevant stimulus appeared, and sometimes no change occurred. Participants had to indicate whenever they noticed a change in the picture. Results showed a pattern of fear-relevant change detection. That is, spider changes were more frequently detected than fear-irrelevant changes, and spider-fearful participants detected more spider changes than non-fearful controls. Further, it was found that high-trait anxious participants did not detect more changes than low-trait anxious participants.
具有威胁性的刺激特征被认为会被快速且自动地处理，因为它们需要立即引起注意。恐惧症患者通常会对与他们特定恐惧类型相关的刺激表现出这些注意力偏差。在本研究中，研究了是否可以使用变化检测范式来研究对恐惧相关刺激的注意力偏差。25名蜘蛛恐惧症患者和25名无恐惧的参与者面对一系列图片，其中有时会逐渐出现一只蜘蛛，有时会出现与恐惧无关的刺激，有时则没有变化。参与者必须在注意到图片中有变化时随时指出。结果显示出与恐惧相关的变化检测模式。也就是说，与恐惧无关的变化相比，蜘蛛的变化被更频繁地检测到，并且蜘蛛恐惧症患者比无恐惧的对照组检测到更多的蜘蛛变化。此外，还发现高特质焦虑的参与者比低特质焦虑的参与者检测到的变化并不更多。
