Pacheco-Unguetti Antonia Pilar, Acosta Alberto, Lupiáñez Juan, Román Naiker, Derakshan Nazanin
Departamento de Psicología Experimental y Fisiología del Comportamiento, Universidad de Granada, Spain.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2012;65(4):646-60. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2011.637114. Epub 2012 Feb 14.
Traditionally, anxiety has been associated with a selective attentional bias for threat and a decreased capacity in attentional control. In two different experiments, we investigated whether individuals with different levels of self-reported state anxiety (Experiment 1) and induced anxiety (Experiment 2) had impaired response inhibition processes (attentional control deficit) as characterized by a different response style in the presence of negative stimuli under low and high perceptual load conditions. A go/no-go paradigm with emotional distractors (angry, happy, and neutral faces) was used to provide measures of perceptual sensitivity, inhibition, and response style. Our findings showed that perceptual sensitivity, as assessed by the d' parameter of signal detection theory, was reduced in all participants for angry faces under low perceptual load, where enough perceptual resources were available to be attracted by distractors. Importantly, despite similar perceptual sensitivity, the beta parameter indicated that high state anxiety individuals in both experiments were less flexible at adjusting to task demands in the presence of angry face distractors by adopting a stricter criterion. Implications of findings are discussed within current models of attentional control in anxiety.
传统上，焦虑一直与对威胁的选择性注意偏向以及注意力控制能力下降有关。在两项不同的实验中，我们研究了自我报告的状态焦虑水平不同的个体（实验1）和诱发焦虑的个体（实验2）在低感知负荷和高感知负荷条件下，面对负面刺激时是否具有以不同反应方式为特征的反应抑制过程受损（注意力控制缺陷）。采用带有情绪干扰物（愤怒、高兴和中性面孔）的Go/No-Go范式来测量感知敏感性、抑制能力和反应方式。我们的研究结果表明，在低感知负荷下，信号检测理论的d'参数评估的感知敏感性在所有参与者中对于愤怒面孔均降低，此时有足够的感知资源被干扰物吸引。重要的是，尽管感知敏感性相似，但β参数表明，在两项实验中，高状态焦虑个体在面对愤怒面孔干扰物时，通过采用更严格的标准来适应任务要求的灵活性较低。研究结果的意义在当前焦虑的注意力控制模型中进行了讨论。
