Berdica Elisa, Gerdes Antje B M, Bublatzky Florian, White Andrew J, Alpers Georg W
Clinical and Biological Psychology and Psychotherapy, Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2018 Jul 23;9:1154. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01154. eCollection 2018.
It is generally thought to be adaptive that fear relevant stimuli in the environment can capture and hold our attention; and in psychopathology attentional allocation is thought to be cue-specific. Such hypervigilance toward threatening cues or difficulty to disengage attention from threat has been demonstrated for a variety of stimuli, for example, toward evolutionary prepared animals or toward socially relevant facial expressions. Usually, specific stimuli have been examined in individuals with particular fears (e.g., animals in animal fearful and faces in socially fearful participants). However, different kinds of stimuli are rarely examined in one study. Thus, it is unknown how different categories of threatening stimuli compete for attention and how specific kinds of fears modulate these attentional processes. In this study, we used a free viewing paradigm: pairs of pictures with threat-related content (spiders or angry faces) or neutral content (butterflies or neutral faces) were presented side by side (i.e., spiders and angry faces, angry and neutral faces, spiders and butterflies, butterflies and neutral faces). Eye-movements were recorded while spider fearful, socially anxious, or non-anxious participants viewed the picture pairs. Results generally replicate the finding that unpleasant pictures more effectively capture attention in the beginning of a trial compared to neutral pictures. This effect was more pronounced in spider fearful participants: the higher the fear the quicker they were in looking at spiders. This was not the case for high socially anxious participants and pictures of angry faces. Interestingly, when presented next to each other, there was no preference in initial orientation for either spiders or angry faces. However, neutral faces were looked at more quickly than butterflies. Regarding sustained attention, we found no general preference for unpleasant pictures compared to neutral pictures.
一般认为，环境中与恐惧相关的刺激能够吸引并保持我们的注意力，这具有适应性；在精神病理学中，注意力分配被认为是线索特异性的。对于各种刺激，例如针对具有进化准备的动物或与社会相关的面部表情，已经证明了对威胁性线索的这种过度警觉或难以将注意力从威胁中转移出来。通常，已经在患有特定恐惧的个体中检查了特定刺激（例如，动物恐惧者中的动物和社交恐惧参与者中的面孔）。然而，在一项研究中很少检查不同类型的刺激。因此，尚不清楚不同类别的威胁性刺激如何竞争注意力，以及特定类型的恐惧如何调节这些注意力过程。在本研究中，我们使用了自由观看范式：并排呈现具有威胁相关内容（蜘蛛或愤怒面孔）或中性内容（蝴蝶或中性面孔）的图片对（即蜘蛛和愤怒面孔、愤怒和中性面孔、蜘蛛和蝴蝶、蝴蝶和中性面孔）。在蜘蛛恐惧、社交焦虑或非焦虑的参与者观看图片对时记录眼动。结果总体上重复了这样的发现，即与中性图片相比，不愉快的图片在试验开始时更有效地吸引注意力。这种效应在蜘蛛恐惧的参与者中更为明显：恐惧程度越高，他们看向蜘蛛的速度就越快。对于高度社交焦虑的参与者和愤怒面孔的图片则不是这样。有趣的是，当彼此相邻呈现时，对于蜘蛛或愤怒面孔在初始注视方向上没有偏好。然而，中性面孔比蝴蝶被更快地注视。关于持续注意力，我们发现与中性图片相比，对不愉快图片没有普遍的偏好。
