Trait Anxiety Affects Attentional Bias Of Negative Stimuli: The Perspective Of Time Dimension

The people with high trait-anxiety are susceptible to have anxiety disorder.And they present attention bias to negative emotion stimuli.This dysfunctional attentional distribution is considered as one of the most important factors which trigger and maintain the anxiety disorder.Many researchers have tried to clarify the mechanism of attention bias of the trait-anxiety people.However,there is a controversy that whether the component of attention bias of the anxious people is facilitated attention or impaired attentional disengagement.To figure out this issue,present research manipulated the relevance of emotion and task and uses RSVP paradigm to explore the temporal dynamic of attentional bias in the high trait-anxiety group.The conclusion of the present research not only helps explain the inconsistent results from previous related researches,but also promotes the measurement,evaluation and intervention of the anxious people.The first study employed the emotional attentional blink(EAB)and the emotion-induced blindness(EIB)to respectively measure the temporal dynamic of top-down and bottom-up attention model.The study contrasted the difference of task performance(accuracy)between high and low trait-anxiety groups(HTA and LTA),in order to examine the distinctive attention model of two groups.The results of EIB showed that at lag 6,the negative distraction did not lead to stronger attentional blink than the neutral distraction in the LTA group.However,at the same time point,the negative distraction caused stronger attentional blink than the neutral distraction in the HTA group.And this difference existed until lag 8.The results indicated that the HTA presented impaired attentional disengagement away from the negative information in the emotion-task irrelevant condition.The results of EAB showed that at lag 8,there was no significant difference of attention blink between neutral T1 and negative T1 in LTA.However,at an earlier lag(lag 4),HTA showed insignificant difference of attention blink between two types of T1.The results indicated that HTA presented facilitated attention to the negative stimuli in the emotion-task relevant condition.The first study concluded that the trait anxiety modulates the time window of attentional blink.The time window of EIB in the HTA is longer than the LTA,while the time window of EAB in the HTA is shorter than the LTA.And the relevancy of emotion and task separates the components of attention bias of trait-anxiety people.When the emotional information is served as a distraction,the HTA has trouble in disengaging attention from the negative stimuli.But,when the emotional stimulation is served as the target,the HTA presentes facilitated attention to the negative information.To further clarify the neural mechanism of the attentional distribution of trait-anxiety people,the second study measured the early and late neural processes of HTA and LTA in EIB and EAB tasks,via the ERP(Event-related Potential)technique of high temporal resolution.The second study was consist of two experiments,EIB and EAB.The behavioral results showed that,there was no significant difference of task performance between two groups either within(lag 2)or without(lag 8)the time window of attention blink.This result was consistent with the results of the first study.The ERP results of EIB showed that:(1)the amplitudes triggered by distraction,including EPN,P3 and LPP,in HTA group were lower than the LTA group.(2)The trait-anxiety only influenced the early process of emotional distraction rather than the mid-term and late process.To be more specific,at the early process(EPN:196-266ms),there was insignificant difference between two groups in the neutral distraction condition.However,in the negative distraction condition,the amplitude of the HTA was lower than the LTA.The ERP results of EAB showed that:(1)the amplitudes triggered by emotional T1,including EPN,P3 and LPP,in HTA group were lower than the LTA group.(2)The trait-anxiety only influenced the mid-term process of emotional T1 rather than the early and late process.To be more specific,at the mid-term process(P3:344?432ms),the difference value of the negative T1 and neutral T1 in the HTA group was lower than the LTA group.(3)The trait-anxiety only influenced the early process of T2 rather than the late process.To be more specific,at the early process(EPN:200?300ms),the result of LTA showed that the amplitude which was triggered by T2 in the neutral condition was much higher than the one in the negative condition.However,there was no significant difference in the HTA group.In the comprehensive view of the results of two tasks,we were able to obtain a general results that when the emotional information was irrelevant to the task,the negative distraction triggered higher amplitude of EPN in the LTA group.But in the HTA group,the limited attention control ability drives the compensation mechanism to complete the task,which reflected as the lower EPN triggered by the negative distraction.When the emotional information was task-relevant,the LTA showed higher P3 amplitude of negative T1 and lower EPN amplitude of T2 in the negative condition.However,the HTA group showed an inversed results that the P3 amplitude triggered by negative T1 was lower and the EPN amplitude of T2 in the negative condition is higher.In general,according to the results from the first and second study,the present research arrived at the conclusions that:(1)the trait anxiety modulates the time window of attentional blink.The time window of EIB in the HTA is longer than the LTA,while the time window of EAB in the HTA is shorter than the LTA.(2)The relevancy of emotion and task is one of the most critical factors that separate the components of attention bias of the HTA.The HTA has trouble in disengaging attention away from the negative distraction,while shows the facilitated attention of the negative target.(3)The relevancy of emotion and task also leads to different attentional processing mechanism-of HTA.When HTA processes the emotional distraction,the imbalanced attentioncontrol mechanism of HTA trigger the central compensation mechanism to reach the similar task performance of LTA.Nevertheless,when the HTA processes the emotional target,their work memory could process emotional stimuli more efficiently during the encoding process.