Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Emotion. 2013 Jun;13(3):520-8. doi: 10.1037/a0031236. Epub 2013 Jan 28.
Threat-related attentional biases represent a basic survival mechanism. These biases include an engagement bias involving rapid direction of attention toward threat and a disengagement bias involving slow direction of attention away from threat. The exact nature of these biases in healthy and anxious individuals remains controversial because of the challenges associated with accurately isolating each of these attentional biases. Combining a cognitive attentional task with classical conditioning using electric stimulation, we created a new paradigm that makes it possible to more clearly isolate these attentional biases. Utilizing this novel paradigm, we detected both types of attentional bias and differentiated between levels of trait anxiety, in which low- and high-trait anxiety individuals showed equal levels of engagement bias, but only high-trait anxiety individuals showed impaired disengagement from threat.
威胁相关的注意偏向代表一种基本的生存机制。这些偏向包括一种参与偏向，涉及注意力快速转向威胁，以及一种脱离偏向，涉及注意力缓慢脱离威胁。由于准确隔离这些注意偏向中的每一个都存在挑战，因此健康个体和焦虑个体中的这些偏向的确切性质仍然存在争议。通过将认知注意任务与电刺激的经典条件作用相结合，我们创建了一种新的范式，使得更清楚地隔离这些注意偏向成为可能。利用这种新颖的范式，我们检测到了两种类型的注意偏向，并区分了特质焦虑的水平，其中低特质焦虑和高特质焦虑个体表现出相同程度的参与偏向，但只有高特质焦虑个体表现出对威胁的脱离受损。
