Tipura Eda, Souto David, Fox Elaine
Laboratory of Behavioral Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Department of Neuroscience, University Medical Center, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Trends Psychol. 2024;32(2):572-588. doi: 10.1007/s43076-023-00305-8. Epub 2023 Jun 22.
A large body of evidence suggests that processing of affective information is typically disrupted in anxiety. It has also been hypothesized that anxious individuals are less able to evaluate contextual cues and to respond in an adaptive way to stress. In the present study, 25 participants (16 females; 9 males) scoring high (scores of 45 or above) and 26 participants (13 females; 13 males) scoring low (scores of 35 and below) on a standardized measure of trait anxiety performed an emotion search task to investigate attentional biases when the task provides an explicit emotional context. An emotional context was set in each block by asking participants to look as quickly as possible at a face expressing a specific emotion, while eye movements were being recorded. On each trial, two faces appeared, one of them expressing the target emotion and the other one expressing a distractor emotion. High trait-anxious participants showed slower response times (time to look at the instructed emotion), regardless of the affective context, compared to the control group. Additionally, we found slower responses to happy faces (positive context) in the anxious group in the presence of neutral and fearful distractors. Cognitive control may therefore be disrupted in anxiety, as anxious people take longer to process (search for) happy faces, presumably because attentional resources are drawn by neutral and fearful distractors. Those differences were not observed in a simple reaction times task, which suggests that attentional biases, and not differential processing of low-level facial features, are responsible for those differences.
大量证据表明，焦虑状态下情感信息的处理通常会受到干扰。也有人提出假设，焦虑个体评估情境线索并以适应性方式应对压力的能力较弱。在本研究中，25名在特质焦虑标准化测量中得分较高（45分及以上）的参与者（16名女性；9名男性）和26名得分较低（35分及以下）的参与者（13名女性；13名男性）进行了一项情绪搜索任务，以研究当任务提供明确的情感背景时的注意偏向。在每个实验块中，通过要求参与者尽快看向一张表达特定情绪的面孔来设置情绪背景，同时记录眼动。在每次试验中，会出现两张面孔，其中一张表达目标情绪，另一张表达干扰情绪。与对照组相比，高特质焦虑参与者无论情感背景如何，反应时间（看向指示情绪的时间）都较慢。此外，我们发现，在存在中性和恐惧干扰物的情况下，焦虑组对快乐面孔（积极背景）的反应较慢。因此，焦虑状态下认知控制可能会受到干扰，因为焦虑的人处理（搜索）快乐面孔的时间更长，大概是因为注意力资源被中性和恐惧干扰物吸引。在简单反应时间任务中未观察到这些差异，这表明是注意偏向而非对低层次面部特征的差异处理导致了这些差异。
