Department of Biological and Health Psychology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Natividad Zubieta Mental Health Center, Navarre Health Service, Spain; School of Education and Psychology, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain.
J Anxiety Disord. 2020 Apr;71:102207. doi: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2020.102207. Epub 2020 Feb 28.
Cognitive theories of anxiety propose that selective attention to negative information plays a central role in the development and maintenance of anxiety. The presence of such attentional bias has been confirmed in younger adults. Nevertheless, there are few studies that have explored anxiety-linked attentional bias in older adults, and the available results are inconclusive. Conversely, the socioemotional selectivity theory posits that there are age-related changes in emotional information processing and, consistent with this account, it has been found that older adults preferentially pay more attention to positive stimuli compared with younger adults ("positivity effect"). The present study aimed to explore attentional bias towards negative and positive information in a sample of older adults with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) compared with a control group. The results showed that older adults with GAD displayed an attentional preference for negative information and attentional avoidance for positive information, whereas healthy older adults showed the reverse pattern of attentional deployment. These results suggest that selective attention toward negative information and selective avoidance of positive information may be a relevant factor in clinically anxious older adults.
焦虑的认知理论提出，对负面信息的选择性注意在焦虑的发展和维持中起着核心作用。这种注意力偏向在年轻成年人中得到了证实。然而，很少有研究探讨老年成年人与焦虑相关的注意力偏向，而且现有结果尚无定论。相反，社会情绪选择理论认为，情绪信息处理存在与年龄相关的变化，并且与这一说法一致，已经发现与年轻成年人相比，老年成年人更倾向于优先关注积极刺激（“积极性效应”）。本研究旨在探讨广泛性焦虑症（GAD）老年成年人样本中对负面和正面信息的注意力偏向，与对照组进行比较。结果表明，患有 GAD 的老年成年人对负面信息表现出注意力偏好，对正面信息表现出注意力回避，而健康的老年成年人则表现出相反的注意力分配模式。这些结果表明，对负面信息的选择性注意和对正面信息的选择性回避可能是临床焦虑老年成年人的一个相关因素。
