Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience, King's College London, De Crespigny Park, London, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience, King's College London, De Crespigny Park, London, United Kingdom.
Clin Psychol Rev. 2017 Jun;54:107-122. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2017.03.006. Epub 2017 Mar 29.
Among anxious populations, attention has been demonstrated to be preferentially biased to threatening material compared to neutral or other valenced material. Individuals who have high levels of trait worry, such as those with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), may be biased to threat but research has produced equivocal findings. This review aimed to systematically review the extant experimental literature to establish the current evidence of attentional bias to threat among trait worriers compared to healthy controls and other clinical populations. Twenty-nine published articles were included in the final review. There was strong evidence of a bias to threat among GAD patients compared to other groups and this was found across most experimental paradigms. Few studies had investigated this bias in non-clinical trait worriers. Among GAD patients this bias to threat was most strongly evidenced when visual threat material was in a verbal-linguistic format (i.e., words) rather than when in pictorial form (i.e., images or faces). The bias was also found across several domains of negative material, supporting the general nature of worry. Further research should look to examine the specific components of the threat bias in GAD, as well as investigating the bias to threat in trait worriers.
在焦虑人群中,与中性或其他效价材料相比,注意被证明优先偏向于威胁性材料。那些具有高水平特质性担忧的个体,如广泛性焦虑障碍(GAD)患者,可能对威胁存在偏见,但研究结果却存在矛盾。本综述旨在系统地回顾现有的实验文献,以确定特质性担忧者与健康对照组和其他临床人群相比,对威胁的注意偏向的当前证据。最终综述纳入了 29 篇已发表的文章。与其他组相比,GAD 患者对威胁存在明显的偏见,而且这种偏见在大多数实验范式中都存在。很少有研究调查过非临床特质性担忧者的这种偏见。在 GAD 患者中,当视觉威胁材料以言语语言形式(即单词)而不是以图像形式(即图像或面孔)呈现时,对威胁的偏见最为明显。这种偏见也存在于几种负面材料的领域中,支持了担忧的普遍性。进一步的研究应该着眼于检查 GAD 中威胁偏见的具体成分,以及调查特质性担忧者对威胁的偏见。