PSITEC laboratory, University Lille Nord de France - UDL3, France.
J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. 2014 Mar;45(1):203-7. doi: 10.1016/j.jbtep.2013.10.007. Epub 2013 Nov 1.
Recent work suggests that the ability to disengage attention from threatening information is impaired in anxiety. The present study compared the difficulty to disengage from angry, fearful and neutral faces in Low Trait Anxious individuals (LTA) versus High Trait Anxious individuals (HTA) at two stages of facial expression processing (i.e., initial and later face processing).
HTA and LTA individuals performed an attentional shifting task to assess attentional disengagement. Participants had to classify a peripheral target letter, appearing 200 or 500 ms after a face was displayed.
LTA individuals were quicker when the letter appears after 500 ms compared to 200 ms regardless of the emotion of the face. An impaired disengagement in HTA individuals was observed for fearful and angry faces (i.e., no reaction differences between 200 and 500 ms) but not for neutral faces. These results suggest that it is particularly difficult for anxious individuals to switch attention from one stimulus to another if the engaged stimulus is a threatening face.
Generalisation of our results is restricted to trait anxiety and emotional facial expression processing.
LTA individuals can benefit from the emotional processing (i.e., from 200 to 500 ms) to make a rapid attentional shift and engagement to the target stimuli whereas HTA individuals did not and continue to process the threatening facial expression. These results also point out the role of top down processes on the regulation of disengagement from threatening information in anxiety.
最近的研究表明，焦虑个体在从威胁性信息中转移注意力的能力上存在缺陷。本研究比较了低特质焦虑个体（LTA）和高特质焦虑个体（HTA）在面部表情处理的两个阶段（即初始阶段和后期阶段）中，从愤怒、恐惧和中性面孔中转移注意力的难度。
HTA 和 LTA 个体执行了一项注意转移任务，以评估注意力的脱离。参与者必须在面孔呈现后 200 或 500 毫秒后对周边目标字母进行分类。
无论面孔的情绪如何，LTA 个体在字母出现在 500 毫秒后比出现在 200 毫秒时更快。HTA 个体在面对恐惧和愤怒面孔时表现出注意力脱离困难（即，在 200 和 500 毫秒之间没有反应差异），但在面对中性面孔时没有。这些结果表明，对于焦虑个体来说，如果被吸引的刺激是威胁性面孔，那么将注意力从一个刺激转移到另一个刺激尤其困难。
我们的研究结果仅限于特质焦虑和情绪面部表情处理的推广。
LTA 个体可以从情绪处理（即 200 到 500 毫秒）中受益，从而快速将注意力转移并专注于目标刺激，而 HTA 个体则没有，并且继续处理威胁性面部表情。这些结果还指出了自上而下的过程在焦虑中对威胁性信息脱离的调节作用。
