Abado Elinor, Sagi Jasmine, Silber Nir, De Houwer Jan, Aue Tatjana, Okon-Singer Hadas
Department of Psychology, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel; The Integrated Brain and Behavior Research Center (IBBR), University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Department of Psychology, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel; The Integrated Brain and Behavior Research Center (IBBR), University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Behav Res Ther. 2020 Dec;135:103729. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2020.103729. Epub 2020 Sep 19.
The present series of studies examines the causal interaction between expectancy and attention biases in spider fear. Previous studies found that a-priori expectancy does not affect attention bias toward spiders, as measured by detection of spider targets in a subsequent visual search array compared to detection of bird targets (i.e. neutral targets) that appeared equally often. In the present series of studies, target frequency was manipulated. Targets were preceded by a verbal cue stating the likelihood that a certain target would appear. The aim was to examine whether manipulation of expectancies toward either target affects attention bias. In Experiment 1, birds appeared more frequently than spiders. Among a representative sample of the student population, attention bias toward spiders was significantly reduced. Experiment 2 replicated these results with both low- and high-fearful participants. In Experiment 3, spiders appeared more frequently than birds. Attention bias was reduced among low- and high-fearful groups, but not as strongly as the reduction in Experiments 1 and 2. These results suggest that target salience plays a role in attention bias, in competition with expectancy. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that varying expectancy can reduce attention bias, most importantly in high fear.
本系列研究考察了蜘蛛恐惧症中预期与注意偏向之间的因果交互作用。先前的研究发现，先验预期并不影响对蜘蛛的注意偏向，这是通过后续视觉搜索阵列中蜘蛛目标的检测与同样频繁出现的鸟类目标（即中性目标）的检测相比较来衡量的。在本系列研究中，对目标频率进行了操控。在目标出现之前会有一个语言提示，说明某个目标出现的可能性。目的是检验对任一目标预期的操控是否会影响注意偏向。在实验1中，鸟类出现的频率高于蜘蛛。在学生群体的代表性样本中，对蜘蛛的注意偏向显著降低。实验2在低恐惧和高恐惧参与者中重复了这些结果。在实验3中，蜘蛛出现的频率高于鸟类。低恐惧和高恐惧组的注意偏向都有所降低，但不如实验1和2中降低的程度那么大。这些结果表明，目标显著性在注意偏向中起作用，与预期相互竞争。据我们所知，这是第一项表明改变预期可以减少注意偏向的研究，最重要的是在高恐惧情况下。
