Weierich Mariann R, Treat Teresa A
a Department of Psychology, Hunter College , The City University of New York , New York , NY , USA.
Cogn Emot. 2015;29(6):992-1006. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2014.960369. Epub 2014 Sep 24.
People with anxiety or stress-related disorders attend differently to threat-relevant compared with non-threat stimuli, yet the temporal mechanisms of differential allocation of attention are not well understood. We investigated two independent mechanisms of temporal processing of visual threat by comparing spider-phobic and non-fearful participants using a rapid serial visual presentation task. Consistent with prior literature, spider phobics, but not non-fearful controls, displayed threat-specific facilitated detection of spider stimuli relative to negative stimuli and neutral stimuli. Further, signal detection analyses revealed that facilitated threat detection in spider-phobic participants was driven by greater sensitivity to threat stimulus features and a trend towards a lower threshold for detecting spider stimuli. However, phobic participants did not display reliably slowed temporal disengagement from threat-relevant stimuli. These findings advance our understanding of threat feature processing that might contribute to the onset and maintenance of symptoms in specific phobia and disorders that involve visual threat information more generally.
患有焦虑或与压力相关障碍的人在关注与威胁相关的刺激时与非威胁性刺激的方式不同，但注意力差异分配的时间机制尚未得到很好的理解。我们通过使用快速序列视觉呈现任务比较蜘蛛恐惧症患者和无恐惧参与者，研究了视觉威胁时间处理的两种独立机制。与先前的文献一致，蜘蛛恐惧症患者而非无恐惧的对照组，相对于负面刺激和中性刺激，表现出对蜘蛛刺激的威胁特异性促进检测。此外，信号检测分析表明，蜘蛛恐惧症参与者中对威胁检测的促进是由对威胁刺激特征的更高敏感性以及检测蜘蛛刺激的阈值降低趋势所驱动的。然而，恐惧症参与者并没有表现出从与威胁相关的刺激中可靠地减慢时间脱离。这些发现推进了我们对威胁特征处理的理解，这可能有助于特定恐惧症以及更普遍涉及视觉威胁信息的障碍中症状的发作和维持。
