Effects of anxiety states on attention towards irrelevant emotional distractors

• Autor(a) principal: Fonseca, Tânia Freitas
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/32897
• topic: State anxiety; Visual search; Threat; Emotion; Distractors; Response time; Attentional bias

The adaptative function of anxiety is essential for the organism’s survival, given that the faster detection of threatening stimuli provides an advantage. In spite of that, anxiety can become pathological when ceases it to be adaptative, that is, when the danger is not real or when the level of activation and duration is disproportionate to the real situation. Thus, an attentional bias to threat has been usually associated, in several cognitive models, with the genesis and maintenance of anxiety. Although this is known in trait-anxiety, little is known about the influence of state anxiety on attentional bias in emotion-irrelevant tasks. Therefore, the present study aimed to understand how feeling anxious might have similar or different effects, compared with trait anxiety, on the magnitude of the attentional bias towards threatening stimuli when these are task-irrelevant. To investigate this, participants completed a task where they had to identify a deviant letter among several letters, all of which where displayed over emotional (angry or happy) and neutral faces. They completed this task while under threat (possible screaming sounds at any time) or under neutral conditions (no sounds). Contrary to what was hypothesized, results showed lower response times when deviant letters were over happy faces, compared to angry or neutral faces. As predicted, however, results showed that angry faces, compared with neutral and happy faces, seem to increase response times when they were presented as distractors. In addition, results also show that under threat blocks, participants experienced an increased attentional bias for angry over happy faces, compared to neutral blocks. These results may have implications towards the understanding of transitory anxiety states, highlighting how these states bias our attention towards threat-related stimuli.