Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion, School of Psychological Science, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Behav Res Methods. 2023 Jan;55(1):135-142. doi: 10.3758/s13428-022-01800-z. Epub 2022 Mar 15.
Contemporary cognitive theories of anxiety and attention processing propose that heightened levels of anxiety vulnerability are associated with a decreasing ability to inhibit the allocation of attention towards task-irrelevant information. Existing performance-based research has most often used eye-movement assessment variants of the antisaccade paradigm to demonstrate such effects. Critically, however, eye-movement assessment methods are limited by expense, the need for expert training in administration, and limited mobility and scalability. These barriers have likely led to researchers' use of suboptimal methods of assessing the relationship between attentional control and anxiety vulnerability. The present study examined the capacity for a non-eye-movement-based variant of the antisaccade task, the masked-target antisaccade task (Guitton et al., 1985), to detect anxiety-linked differences in attentional control. Participants (N = 342) completed an assessment of anxiety vulnerability and performed the masked-target antisaccade task in an online assessment session. Greater levels of anxiety vulnerability predicted poorer performance on the task, consistent with findings observed from eye-movement methods and with cognitive theories of anxiety and attention processing. Results also revealed the task to have high internal reliability. Our findings indicate that the masked-target antisaccade task provides a psychometrically reliable, low-cost, mobile, and scalable assessment of anxiety-linked differences in attentional control.
当代关于焦虑和注意加工的认知理论提出，较高的焦虑易感性与抑制注意力分配到任务无关信息的能力下降有关。现有的基于表现的研究大多使用反扫视范式的眼动评估变体来证明这种效应。然而，重要的是，眼动评估方法受到费用、管理方面专家培训的需求以及有限的移动性和可扩展性的限制。这些障碍可能导致研究人员使用评估注意力控制和焦虑易感性之间关系的次优方法。本研究考察了基于非眼动的反扫视任务变体，即掩蔽目标反扫视任务（Guitton 等人，1985 年），是否能够检测到与焦虑相关的注意力控制差异。参与者（N=342）完成了焦虑易感性评估，并在在线评估会议上执行了掩蔽目标反扫视任务。较高的焦虑易感性预示着在任务上的表现较差，这与从眼动方法和焦虑与注意加工的认知理论中观察到的结果一致。结果还显示该任务具有较高的内部可靠性。我们的研究结果表明，掩蔽目标反扫视任务提供了一种心理测量可靠、成本低、移动性强且可扩展的注意力控制与焦虑相关差异的评估方法。
