The Time Course Characteristics Of Attentional Bias To Positive And Negative Stimuli Among People With High And Low Trait Anxiety

Attentional bias is a hot topic of researches of anxiety in recent years.Compared with neutral stimuli,individuals can quickly notice negative stimuli and it is difficult to disengage from negative stimuli.This phenomenon is called negative attentional bias.Similarly,individuals have a positive bias towards positive stimuli compared to neutral stimuli.A large number of studies have confirmed that anxious individuals exhibit a more pronounced attentional bias effect on negative stimuli due to the abnormal mechanism of cognitive function.However,it is still controversial whether the attentional bias of anxious individuals on negative stimuli is due to facilitated attention or the difficulty in disengaging.In addition,in the study of the magnitude of negative attention bias and positive attentional bias in anxious individuals,previous studies usually used neutral conditions as the baseline,and found that,compared with positive attentional bias,anxious individuals showed greater negative attentional bias effect.However,in real life,anxious individuals often face complex situations where positive and negative stimuli occur at the same time.For a long time,the preferential selection mechanism for the negative stimulus orientation of the anxious population makes it easy to immerse them in negative emotions and stress for a long time.This may be the root cause of anxiety.Therefore,it is of great theoretical value and practical significance to investigate the attentional bias mechanism of anxious individuals in the presence of both positive and negative stimuli.At present,there is still a lack of selective attention mechanism for anxious individuals facing both positive and negative emotional stimuli.In this study,a probe dot paradigm was used and ERP techniques were used to examine the characteristics of the time course of attention bias and processing mechanisms in high-and low-trait anxiety populations when they face positive and negative emotional stimuli at the same time.Experiment 1 used a mixed experimental design of 2(group:high-trait anxiety group,low-trait anxiety group)x 3(emotion:negative,positive,neutral)x 2(location of the probe dot:ipsilateral,heterolateral).Neutral stimulation was selected as a baseline to examine the processing mechanism of attentional bias in high-and low-trait anxiety populations.The behavioral results showed that compared with the neutral stimulation,the high trait anxiety group had attentional avoidance of negative stimuli,while the low trait anxiety group had difficulties in disengaging from negative stimuli.ERP results showed that in the early phase of attentional processing,compared with the neutral stimulation,the high-anxiety anxiety group exhibited a greater N2pc effect than the low-trait anxiety group,but only the low-trait anxiety group had a positive stimulus.There is an N2pc effect.In the late stage of processing,the high and low trait anxiety groups showed greater LPP amplitude than the neutral stimuli for both positive and negative stimuli,but had the largest LPP amplitude for negative stimuli.Experiment 2 used 2(group:high-trait anxiety population,low-trait anxiety group)x 3(emotion:negative-positive,negative-negative,positive-positive)x 2(location of the probe dot:ipsilateral,heterolateral).The mixed experiment design examined the time course characteristics and processing mechanisms of attentional bias in high and low trait anxiety populations,when presenting both positive and negative stimuli.The behavioral results showed that when positive and negative stimuli were present at the same time,only high-anxiety anxiety groups had difficulties in disengaging from negative stimuli.ERP results showed that,in the early stage of attentional processing,when the positive and negative stimuli were present at the same time,both the high and low trait anxiety group had N2pc effect on negative stimuli,but the high trait anxiety group showed greater N2pc than the low anxiety group,effect.In the late stage of processing,there was no significant difference in the amplitude of negative stimulus LPP between high and low trait anxious populations.Based on the results of the combination of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2,the study concludes that whether the neutral stimulus is used as a baseline or a condition where positive and negative stimuli are present at the same time,in the early stage of attention processing,the high-trait anxiety group has lower trait anxiety than the low-trait anxiety group.The crowd showed greater N2pc effect on negative stimuli,and there was an acceleration of attention.However,in the late stage of attentional processing,only the neutral stimulus as a baseline condition,the high trait anxiety population exhibited the largest LPP amplitude for negative stimuli.However,there was no difference in the amplitude of LPP in the high-trait anxiety group under the condition of both positive and negative stimulus.It shows that although the high trait anxiety group will pay more attention resources to the negative stimulus in the early stage of attention processing.However,matching positive stimuli at the same time when negative stimuli occur is beneficial to the adjustment of the original negative stimuli in the high-anxiety trait anxious group at the late attention processing stage.This study found that the application of positive stimuli can regulate the attentional bias mechanism of negative stimuli in high trait anxiety populations,and has important application value in the clinical intervention of anxiety patients.