Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Cogn Emot. 2012;26(8):1390-411. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2012.662892. Epub 2012 May 30.
Attentional biases for threatening stimuli have been implicated in the development of anxiety disorders. However, little is known about the relative influences of trait and state anxiety on attentional biases. This study examined the effects of trait and state anxiety on attention to emotional images. Low, mid, and high trait anxious participants completed two trial blocks of an eye-tracking task. Participants viewed image pairs consisting of one emotional (threatening or positive) and one neutral image while their eye movements were recorded. Between trial blocks, participants underwent an anxiety induction. Primary analyses examined the effects of trait and state anxiety on the proportion of viewing time on emotional versus neutral images. State anxiety was associated with increased attention to threatening images for participants, regardless of trait anxiety. Furthermore, when in a state of anxiety, relative to a baseline condition, durations of initial gaze and average fixation were longer on threat versus neutral images. These findings were specific to the threatening images; no anxiety-related differences in attention were found with the positive images. The implications of these results for future research, models of anxiety-related information processing, and clinical interventions for anxiety are discussed.
注意偏向于威胁性刺激与焦虑障碍的发展有关。然而，对于特质焦虑和状态焦虑对注意偏向的相对影响知之甚少。本研究考察了特质焦虑和状态焦虑对情绪图像注意的影响。低、中、高特质焦虑参与者完成了两次眼动追踪任务的试次块。参与者观看由一张情绪（威胁或积极）和一张中性图片组成的图片对，同时记录他们的眼球运动。在试次块之间，参与者接受了焦虑诱发。主要分析考察了特质焦虑和状态焦虑对情绪图片与中性图片观看时间比例的影响。状态焦虑与参与者对威胁性图像的注意力增加有关，而与特质焦虑无关。此外，与基线条件相比，在焦虑状态下，对威胁性与中性图片的初始注视和平均注视时间更长。这些发现仅针对威胁性图像；在积极图像中，没有发现与焦虑相关的注意差异。讨论了这些结果对未来研究、焦虑相关信息处理模型以及焦虑的临床干预的意义。
