Effect Of Acute Stress On Attention Orientation Towards Threatening Stimuli

Acute stress is a reaction when unpredictable and uncontrollable environment’s requirement is beyond the organism’s natural regulatory capacity.Attentional bias refers to the bias towards the threat of stimulus when there are some differences between distribution of attention to the threat stimulation and the neutral stimulation.Predecessors have found that the degree of attentional bias can predict an individuals’ response of cortisol in the following stressful environment.However,it is unclear how acute stress affects attentional bias.For example,whether acute stress will enhance people’s attention to the threat of attention? At present,the issue is still unclear and needs further researches.Based on the background,we use adolescents as subjects and apply event-related potential technique to investigate the impact of acute stress on adolescents’ threat-oriented attentional orientation,and clarify the cognitive neurological mechanism of acute stress affecting the threat-oriented attentional orientation.The study will be divided into two groups,including stress group and control group,to study the impact of threat stimuli on young people.First of all,44 adolescents aged 12-25 years were randomly divided into stress group(n = 23)and control group(n = 21).Then the stress group was subjected to cold stress task and mental arithmetic task Excitement,then is the dot-probe task.Finally,the data of two groups were analyzed.During the whole experiment,the subjects were asked to fill in the questionnaire five times and record the EEG data of the subjects in the point exploration task.In the experiment,the spot detection paradigm was used to assess the level of attention bias.The subjects were stressed by the SECPT paradigm,and the emotion of the subjects was measured by the positive and negative emotion scale and the state trait anxiety questionnaire.The results of the experiment showed that:(1)Before traumatic stress induction,trait anxiety questionnaire showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups;(2)In the five state anxiety questionnaires,there was no interaction between the two groups,except the third questionnaire.The differences between the two groups indicated that the stress group state anxiety was significantly greater than the control group;(3)With respect to point detection paradigm bias reaction,the results showed that both the stress group and the control group both pay attention to difficulty-relieving and attention Directional-accelerating.There was no significant difference between the two groups,which is consistent with previous studies;(4)In the EEG data,the stress group had a larger N2 pc amplitude than the control group,which was consistent with the hypothesis.On the LPP component,there was no significant difference between the stress group and the control group.Threat information has no lasting effect.