Hunter Colton L, Shields Grant S
Department of Psychological Science, University of Arkansas, USA.
Compr Psychoneuroendocrinol. 2023 Jul 20;15:100195. doi: 10.1016/j.cpnec.2023.100195. eCollection 2023 Aug.
Attentional biases toward or away from emotionally evocative stimuli have been well documented and are known to be clinically relevant, making it important to understand how various factors contribute to them. Some work has suggested that acute stress modulates attentional biases, but this work has produced inconsistent results. For example, many studies have found that stress enhances attentional bias, others that stress decreases attentional bias, and others still that there is no effect of stress at all. Methodological differences may explain these inconsistencies. For example, discrepancies exist between studies in participant sex (e.g., mixed sample vs. all men) and in the type of attentional bias paradigm. We addressed these gaps by examining the effects of an acute social stressor (vs. control) on attentional bias assessed via facial dot probe, focusing on potential sex differences in these effects ( = 141). We found that, overall, participants were significantly biased towards threat, but biases did not differ by stress condition or sex. These findings help to clarify the existing discrepancy in the literature, as we found that stress exerts little if any effect on attentional bias assessed via a facial dot probe.
对引发情绪的刺激的注意偏向或远离已得到充分记录，并且已知具有临床相关性，因此了解各种因素如何促成这些偏向非常重要。一些研究表明，急性应激会调节注意偏向，但这项工作产生了不一致的结果。例如，许多研究发现应激会增强注意偏向，另一些研究发现应激会降低注意偏向，还有一些研究发现应激根本没有影响。方法学上的差异可能解释了这些不一致之处。例如，不同研究在参与者性别（例如，混合样本与全男性样本）以及注意偏向范式类型方面存在差异。我们通过研究急性社会应激源（与对照组相比）对通过面部点探测评估的注意偏向的影响来填补这些空白，重点关注这些影响中潜在的性别差异（n = 141）。我们发现，总体而言，参与者明显偏向于威胁，但偏向在应激条件或性别上没有差异。这些发现有助于澄清文献中现有的差异，因为我们发现应激对通过面部点探测评估的注意偏向几乎没有影响。
