Attentional Bias Of Individuals With Different Anxiety Sensitivities To Medical-related Information

Emergent events of public health are prone to cause widespread emotional reactions and psychological changes,including anxiety,depression and obsessivecompulsive psychology.Anxiety is one of the most common emotions during the epidemic of COVID-19.According to the cognitive model of healthy anxiety,attentional bias towards both internal and external health-related threatening stimuli plays an important role in the development of anxiety,because it leads to the prioritization of such stimuli.Anxiety sensitivity,as a kind of relatively stable susceptibility to anxiety,can affect individual anxiety.Studies have found that individuals with high anxiety sensitivity have attentional bias towards threatening stimuli and health-related information,which can lead to deeper anxiety.However,studies on the effect of anxiety sensitivity have reached different conclusions.Therefore,medical pictures related to epidemic situation and health were selected as the materials in this study,aiming to explore the characteristics of attention bias of individuals with different anxiety sensitivity towards medical pictures.In the first experiment,individuals with different anxiety sensitivities were screened by the Chinese Anxiety Sensitivity Scale(ASI-3),and 18 individuals with high sensitivity and 18 individuals with low anxiety sensitivity were selected.The attentional bias and the effect of anxiety sensitivity on the attentional bias of medicalrelated images were investigated.The experiment adopts the classical dot-probe paradigm.The results showed that the main effect of consistency was significant,and the reaction time of the participants in the consistent condition was significantly higher than the reaction time of the participants in the inconsistent condition,which indicated that the participants generally generated attention avoidance to medical related information.There is a marginal significant interaction of consistency and picture type,further simple effect analysis results show that the reaction time of low anxiety sensitive group of subjects under the condition of the same reaction time significantly longer than the inconsistent condition,high sensitive group of individuals in the same conditions and inconsistent reaction under the condition of no significant difference,while no significant main effect of group,shows different anxiety sensitivity of individual for medical related pictures there may be a similar note model.On the basis of Experiment 1,Experiment 2 combined with the eye-movement technique and the dot-probe paradigm to further explore the attentional bias pattern and time process of different anxiety-sensitive individuals towards medical-related information.The anxiety sensitivity scale was used to screen 16 subjects with high and low anxiety sensitivity.On the basis of Experiment 1,Experiment 2 improved the materials to distinguish the medical images associated with high epidemic situation and those associated with low epidemic situation,and explored whether the attentional bias was directly related to the epidemic situation.In Experiment 2,the time to first fixation,first fixation duration,gaze duration,dwell time,fixation count and fixation rate were selected as indexes.The results showed that both high anxiety sensitive individuals and low anxiety sensitive individuals followed a relatively similar pattern of attention bias for medical-related information,and different types of medical pictures also showed a relatively similar pattern in various eye movement indicators.The first fixation time of the two types of medical images was shorter than that of the neutral images,indicating that the subjects were more likely to pay attention to the medical-related images in the early stage of processing,and there was attention orientation for the medical-related images.However,the first fixation duration reflects the attention maintenance of medical information in the early stage of attention.Compared with neutral stimuli,the subjects showed more attention processing to medical-related information in terms of gaze duration,fixation count and fixation rate.This experiment drew the following conclusion.The individuals of different anxiety sensitivity have similar attention process for medical information.Orientation occurred in the early stage of attention and maintenance of attention existed overall.Participants showed attentional bias to different types of medical stimuli,and showed similar attentional patterns for both,suggesting that the epidemic may have caused an overall attentional bias to medical and health-related information,rather than a specific bias to the epidemic information.