Negative Attentional Bias Of College Students With Intrinsic Anxiety And Its Time

Trait anxiety refers to the relatively lasting and stable individual difference about anxiety tendency, it means that people tend to percept the stimuli of external environment as danger or threat and generate anxious reacting to the threat. Attentional bias refers to a tendency that has one’s attention initially drawn and sustained by one category of salient stimulus over another. Recently, researchers agree that attentional bias is not only the additional phenomenon or symptoms along with the mental illness, but also is the cause in maintain and recurrence of mental illness, Therefore, there is an important clinical significance to explore the anxious individuals’ attentional biases.Some researchers thought that anxious individuals displayed different attentional allocation towards threat stimuli. Attentional bias towards threat information contained three components (i.e. facilitated attention, difficulty in disengagement, and attentional avoidance), and displayed different component of attentional bias in different processing stages. But because the lack of systematical control about related variables (especially the type of threat stimulus) in most of studies, the controversy about the component and mechanism of attentional bias to threat in trait anxiety was still existed. Method:24 high trait anxious colleges and 24 low trait anxious colleges were selected by the Chinese trait version of the State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T) and the Marlowe-Crowne’s Social Desirability Scale (MCSD), and the experimental materials were selected from International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and Native Chinese Affective Picture System (CFAPS). In this study we used the spatial cueing paradigm, and we controlled the variables (i.e. experimental paradigm, presentation duration of threat cue, the type and intension of threat stimuli and the type of subjects) to explore the individual differences of attentional bias towards threat in trait anxious collage students. Specifically, in the experiment 1, we examine the components and mechanisms of attentional bias by presenting the different intensions of physiological threat (highly, moderately, and neutral threatening pictorial cues) when the cues presented 10ms, 100ms and 500ms; In the experiment2, we examine the components and mechanisms of attentional bias by presenting the emotional facial pictures (angry facial pictures and neutral facial pictures), which have more social threat, when the cues presented 10ms, 100ms,500ms and 1000ms. Results:(1) In the first experimentl, we examine the components and time course characteristics of attentional bias by presenting the different intensions of physiological threat (highly, moderately, and neutral threatening pictorial cues):both groups showed attentional avoidance of threat cues when threat cues presented 10ms. Specifically, HTA group showed attentional avoidance of HT pictures and MT pictures, and LTA group only showed attentional avoidance of HT pictures; When the threat cues presented 100ms, both groups didn’t show any attentional bias to the locations of threat pictures; When the threat cues presented 500ms, both groups showed attentional avoidance of HT pictures; and the attentional avoidance of HT pictures was larger than that of MT pictures. Meanwhile, HTA and LTA group displayed difficulty in disengaging from HT pictures.(2) In the second experiment, we examine the components and time course characteristics of attentional bias by presenting the threatening facial expression as cues: When the facial cues presented 10ms, only HTA group showed facilitated attention with AF pictures; When cues presented 100ms and 500ms, HTA group showed attentional avoidance of AF pictures; When cues presented 1000ms, both groups didn’t show any atttentional bias about AF pictures. Conclusions:(1) Attentional engagement and disengagement are the important factors in occurring of attentional bias, and the formation of attentional bias in time course is not necessarily resulting from a certain attentional component, it can be influenced by diverse attentional components. (2) HTA group may have a highly sensitive system of threat detection, and they tend to evaluate the mild and uncertain threat information as highly threatened; HTA group show difficulty in disengaging from highly threat pictures due to the poor attentional control ability. (3) HTA group are more sensitive to angry facial expression with social threatening, and both HTA and LTA group show different attentional bias model to physiological and social threat information.