Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK.
Cogn Emot. 2011 Jun;25(4):626-38. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2010.508887.
Increased vigilance to threat-related stimuli is thought to be a core cognitive feature of anxiety. We sought to investigate the cognitive impact of experimentally induced anxiety, by means of a 7.5% CO(2) challenge, which acts as an unconditioned anxiogenic stimulus, on attentional bias for positive and negative facial cues of emotional expression in the dot-probe task. In two experiments we found robust physiological and subjective effects of the CO(2) inhalation consistent with the claim that the procedure reliably induces anxiety. Data from the dot-probe task demonstrated an attentional bias to emotional facial expressions compared with neutral faces regardless of valence (happy, angry, and fearful). These attentional effects, however, were entirely inconsistent in terms of their relationship with induced anxiety. We conclude that the previously reported poor reliability of this task is the most parsimonious explanation for our conflicting findings and that future research should develop a more reliable paradigm for measuring attentional bias in this field.
人们认为，对威胁相关刺激的高度警惕是焦虑的核心认知特征。我们试图通过 7.5%的 CO2 挑战来研究实验性诱发焦虑对注意偏向的认知影响，CO2 作为一种非条件性的焦虑刺激，作用于情绪表达的正性和负性面部线索的注意偏向，我们在两个实验中发现，CO2 吸入的生理和主观效果非常显著，这与该程序可靠地诱发焦虑的说法一致。来自点探测任务的数据表明，与中性面孔相比，人们对情绪面孔（包括快乐、愤怒和恐惧）存在注意偏向。然而，这些注意效应在与诱发焦虑的关系方面完全不一致。我们得出的结论是，先前关于该任务可靠性较差的报告是对我们相互矛盾的发现的最合理解释，未来的研究应该开发出一种更可靠的范式，以衡量该领域的注意偏向。
