Selective attention to threat in the dot probe paradigm: differentiating vigilance and difficulty to disengage

The dot probe task [J Abnorm Psychol 95 (1986) 15] is an often-used paradigm to investigate selective attention to threat. A facilitated response to probes that appear at the same location of threat information in comparison with responses to probes at the opposite location of threat information is interpreted as vigilance for threat. We argue that the findings in the dot probe paradigm are ambiguous evidence for the vigilance to threat hypothesis. Results can also be interpreted as a difficulty to disengage from threat. In this study, 44 undergraduates performed a pictorial version of the probe detection task. Taking into account the reaction times on neutral trials, we found no evidence for a facilitated detection of threatening information. It was found that the dot probe effects are at least partially due to disengagement effects. The implications of these results for the understanding of attentional bias in normal and anxious individuals are discussed.     

Rejection sensitivity and disruption of attention by social threat cues

Two studies tested the hypothesis that Rejection Sensitivity (RS) increases vulnerability to disruption of attention by social threat cues, as would be consistent with prior evidence that it motivates individuals to prioritize detecting and managing potential rejection at a cost to other personal and interpersonal goals. In Study 1, RS predicted disruption of ongoing goal-directed attention by social threat but not negative words in an Emotional Stroop task. In Study 2, RS predicted attentional avoidance of threatening but not pleasant faces in a Visual Probe task. Threat-avoidant attention was also associated with features of borderline personality disorder. This research extends understanding of processes by which RS contributes to a self-perpetuating cycle of interpersonal problems and distress.     

The relation between electroencephalogram asymmetry and attention biases to threat at baseline and under stress

Electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry in the alpha frequency band has been implicated in emotion processing and broad approach-withdrawal motivation systems. Questions remain regarding the cognitive mechanisms that may help elucidate the observed links between EEG asymmetry and patterns of socioemotional functioning. The current study observed frontal EEG asymmetry patterns at rest and under social threat among young adults (N = 45, M = 21.1 years). Asymmetries were, in turn, associated with performance on an emotion-face dot-probe attention bias task. Attention biases to threat have been implicated as potential causal mechanisms in anxiety and social withdrawal. Frontal EEG asymmetry at baseline did not predict attention bias patterns to angry or happy faces. However, increases in right frontal alpha asymmetry from baseline to the stressful speech condition were associated with vigilance to angry faces and avoidance of happy faces. The findings may reflect individual differences in the pattern of response (approach or withdrawal) with the introduction of a mild stressor. Comparison analyses with frontal beta asymmetry and parietal alpha asymmetry did not find similar patterns. Thus, the data may reflect the unique role of frontal regions, particularly the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, in cognitive control and threat detection, coupled with ruminative processes associated with alpha activity.     

Memory and attention for social threat: anxious hypercoding-avoidance and submissive gaze aversion

Rivalry for dominance is a recurrent challenge in human social interaction. During these social dominance interactions, some people rapidly break eye contact, whereas others merely try to avoid such eye-to-eye confrontations. The first is an example of submissive gaze aversion, whereas the second reflects anxious gaze avoidance. We tested these distinct forms of gaze behavior within a social-memory setting and show that anxious individuals vigilantly attend to, superiorly remember, and subsequently avoid social threats (i.e., angry faces). Furthermore, submissive individuals, as indexed by high trait anxiety and low trait anger, exhibit rapid gaze aversion from facial anger. Mechanisms of hypervigilance-avoidance thus seem to underlie natural gaze behavior and enhanced memory for threat in anxiety. Accordingly, we propose the term hypercoding-avoidance, which describes how anxious individuals habitually scan their immediate social environment for threat, remember its location, and subsequently avoid it. Moreover, this is the first experimental evidence showing that submissive gaze aversion is distinct from anxious gaze avoidance.     

Worrying about chronic pain: vigilance to threat and misdirected problem solving

Worry is reviewed to inform a cognitive-behavioural understanding of chronic pain. How worry comes to dominate is discussed as 'vigilance' and why worry comes to dominate is discussed as 'problem solving'. These two aspects are applied to worrying about chronic pain. Chronic pain is re-presented as chronic vigilance to threat that may lead to a perservation of attempts at solving the problem of achieving escape from pain. Attempts will be frustrated by the insolubility of the problem of chronic pain. The clinical and theoretical implications of this application are discussed.     

Anxiety and the allocation of attention to threat

Using a probe detection technique we have recently demonstrated that anxious subjects consistently deploy attention towards threat-related stimuli, whereas non-anxious controls tend to move attention away from such material (MacLeod, Mathews, & Tata, 1986).

The current study employed the same paradigm but attempted to distinguish the role of trait and state anxiety by testing high- and low-trait students when state anxiety was relatively low (12 weeks before a major examination) and again when it was relatively high (one week before this examination). High-trait subjects alone tended to shift attention towards generally threatening material on both test occasions. Results for examination-related stimuli were more complex. Increased proximity to the examination was associated with an increase in attentional bias towards such threat stimuli in high-trait subjects, but with increased attentional avoidance of such stimuli in low-trait subjects. It is suggested that the attentional response to currently relevant stress-related stimuli may be associated with neither trait nor state anxiety alone, but with an interactive function involving both these variables. These results are discussed in relation to existing models of emotion and cognition, and alternative interpretations of the findings are considered.     

Early social attention impairments in autism: social orienting, joint attention, and attention to distress

This study investigated social attention impairments in autism (social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress) and their relations to language ability. Three- to four-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 72), 3- to 4-year-old developmentally delayed children (n = 34), and 12- to 46-month-old typically developing children (n = 39), matched on mental age, were compared on measures of social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress. Children with autism performed significantly worse than the comparison groups in all of these domains. Combined impairments in joint attention and social orienting were found to best distinguish young children with ASD from those without ASD. Structural equation modeling indicated that joint attention was the best predictor of concurrent language ability. Social orienting and attention to distress were indirectly related to language through their relations with joint attention. These results help to clarify the nature of social attention impairments in autism, offer clues to developmental mechanisms, and suggest targets for early intervention.     

Cognitive coping with the threat of rape: vigilance and cognitive avoidance

Individual differences in women's avoidant and vigilant style in coping with the threat of rape were explored in four studies. In the first study, 97 women read a rape scenario and completed measures of cognitive vigilance and avoidance. They also provided ratings of fear of rape and anticipated coping problems in case of sexual assault. Vigilance was associated with significantly higher levels of fear of rape and anticipation of more severe coping problems. No effects were found for cognitive avoidance. Study 2 replicated these findings with a sample of 275 women. In addition, it showed that high vigilance was associated with significantly more rape-preventive behaviors. Study 3, including 172 women, was an online study on the effect of cognitive coping style on fear of rape, anticipated coping problems, and two behavioral measures of rape avoidance. High vigilance was related to higher levels of fear of rape, anticipation of more severe coping problems, and more rape-preventive behaviors. Finally, Study 4 (N=210) showed that individual differences in cognitive coping style affected rape-related affect and behavior in the absence of a rape scenario, underlining the chronic salience of the threat of rape for women. Vigilance was positively related to fear of rape, rape-avoidance behavior, and anticipated coping problems. In contrast, a negative relationship was found between cognitive avoidance and fear of rape, rape-avoidance strategies, and anticipated coping problems. Across the four studies, no evidence was found for an interactive effect of cognitive avoidance and vigilance, as suggested by the construct of repression versus sensitization. The findings are discussed in the light of previous research on repression-sensitization in coping with threatening information.     

Rising to the threat: Reducing stereotype threat by reframing the threat as a challenge

In two experiments, we found that the performance-inhibiting consequences of stereotype threat were eliminated when the threat was subtly reframed as a challenge. In Experiment 1, Black school children in North Carolina completed a 10-item mathematics test. Participants who reported their race before taking the test performed more poorly than participants who reported their race after completing the test, unless the test was framed as a challenge. Experiment 2 replicated this effect with undergraduates at a prestigious university. When reminded that they graduated from high schools that were poorly represented at the university, they performed more poorly than their peers on a math test. However, when the test was reframed as a challenge, this threat had no effect on their performance. These findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical applications for both educational and athletic training.     

Flexible attention allocation to visual and auditory working memory tasks: manipulating reward induces a trade-off

Prominent roles for general attention resources are posited in many models of working memory, but the manner in which these can be allocated differs between models or is not sufficiently specified. We varied the payoffs for correct responses in two temporally-overlapping recognition tasks, a visual array comparison task and a tone sequence comparison task. In the critical conditions, an increase in reward for one task corresponded to a decrease in reward for the concurrent task, but memory load remained constant. Our results show patterns of interference consistent with a trade-off between the tasks, suggesting that a shared resource can be flexibly divided, rather than only fully allotted to either of the tasks. Our findings support a role for a domain-general resource in models of working memory, and furthermore suggest that this resource is flexibly divisible.     

Lending a hand: social regulation of the neural response to threat

Social contact promotes enhanced health and well-being, likely as a function of the social regulation of emotional responding in the face of various life stressors. For this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, 16 married women were subjected to the threat of electric shock while holding their husband's hand, the hand of an anonymous male experimenter, or no hand at all. Results indicated a pervasive attenuation of activation in the neural systems supporting emotional and behavioral threat responses when the women held their husband's hand. A more limited attenuation of activation in these systems occurred when they held the hand of a stranger. Most strikingly, the effects of spousal hand-holding on neural threat responses varied as a function of marital quality, with higher marital quality predicting less threat-related neural activation in the right anterior insula, superior frontal gyrus, and hypothalamus during spousal, but not stranger, hand-holding.     

Automatic vigilance: the attention-grabbing power of approach- and avoidance-related social information

The automatic processing of information was investigated, varying valence (positive vs. negative) and relevance (other-relevant traits [ORT] vs. possessor-relevant traits [PRT]; G. Peeters, 1983) of stimuli. ORTs denote unconditionally positive or negative consequences for persons in the social environment of the holder of the trait (e.g., honest, brutal) whereas PRTs denote unconditionally positive or negative consequences for the trait holder (e.g., happy, depressive). In 2 experiments using the Stroop paradigm, larger interference effects were found for ORTs than PRTs. This is due to the behavior-relatedness of ORTs. In a go/no-go lexical decision task (Experiment 3), participants either had to withdraw their finger from a pressed key (i.e., "avoid") or had to press a key (i.e., "approach") if a word was presented. Responses to negative ORTs were relatively faster in the withdraw condition, whereas positive ORTs were relatively faster in the press condition.     

The neural correlates of social attention: automatic orienting to social and nonsocial cues

Previous evidence suggests that directional social cues (e.g., eye gaze) cause automatic shifts in attention toward gaze direction. It has been proposed that automatic attentional orienting driven by social cues (social orienting) involves a different neural network from automatic orienting driven by nonsocial cues. However, previous neuroimaging studies on social orienting have only compared gaze cues to symbolic cues, which typically engage top-down mechanisms. Therefore, we directly compared the neural activity involved in social orienting to that involved in purely automatic nonsocial orienting. Twenty participants performed a spatial cueing task consisting of social (gaze) cues and automatic nonsocial (peripheral squares) cues presented at short and long stimulus (cue-to-target) onset asynchronies (SOA), while undergoing fMRI. Behaviorally, a facilitation effect was found for both cue types at the short SOA, while an inhibitory effect (inhibition of return: IOR) was found only for nonsocial cues at the long SOA. Imaging results demonstrated that social and nonsocial cues recruited a largely overlapping fronto-parietal network. In addition, social cueing evoked greater activity in occipito-temporal regions at both SOAs, while nonsocial cueing recruited greater subcortical activity, but only for the long SOA (when IOR was found). A control experiment, including central arrow cues, confirmed that the occipito-temporal activity was at least in part due to the social nature of the cue and not simply to the location of presentation (central vs. peripheral). These results suggest an evolutionary trajectory for automatic orienting, from predominantly subcortical mechanisms for nonsocial orienting to predominantly cortical mechanisms for social orienting.     

Cascading effects: the influence of attention bias to threat on the interpretation of ambiguous information

Both attention bias to threat and negative interpretive bias have been implicated in the emergence and maintenance of anxiety disorders. However, relations between attention and interpretive biases remain poorly understood. The current study experimentally manipulated attention bias to threat and examined the effects of attention training on the way ambiguous information was interpreted. Results suggest that the preferential allocation of attention towards threat affects the manner in which ambiguous information is interpreted. Individuals trained to attend to threat were more likely than individuals in a placebo training group to interpret ambiguous information in a threat-related manner. These data suggest that perturbations in the initial stages of information processing associated with anxiety may lead to a cascade of subsequent processing biases.     

Traits, states, and attentional gates: temperament and threat relevance as predictors of attentional bias to social threat

This study investigated the influence of situational and dispositional factors on attentional biases toward social threat, and the impact of these attentional biases on distress in a sample of adolescents. The results suggest greater biases for personally relevant threat cues, as individuals reporting high social stress were vigilant to subliminal social threat cues, but not physical threat cues, and those reporting low social stress showed no attentional biases. Individual differences in fearful temperament and attentional control interacted to influence attentional biases, with fearful temperament predicting biases to supraliminal social threat only for individuals with poor attentional control. Multivariate analyses exploring relations between attentional biases for social threat and symptoms of anxiety and depression revealed that attentional biases alone were rarely related to symptoms. However, biases did interact with social stress, fearful temperament, and attentional control to predict distress. The results are discussed in terms of automatic and effortful cognitive mechanisms underlying threat cue processing.     

Submitting to defeat: social anxiety, dominance threat, and decrements in testosterone

ABSTRACT— Although theory suggests a link between social anxiety and social dominance, direct empirical evidence for this link is limited. The present experiment tested the hypothesis that socially anxious individuals, particularly men, would respond to a social-dominance threat by exhibiting decrements in their testosterone levels, an endocrinological change that typically reflects pronounced social submission in humans and other animals. Participants were randomly assigned to either win or lose a rigged face-to-face competition with a confederate. Although no zero-order relationship between social anxiety and level of testosterone was observed, testosterone levels showed a pronounced drop among socially anxious men who lost the competition. No significant changes were observed in nonanxious men or in women. This research provides novel insight into the nature and consequences of social anxiety, and also illustrates the utility of integrating social psychological theory with endocrinological approaches to psychological science.     

A new look at social attention: Orienting to the eyes is not (entirely) under volitional control

People tend to look at other people's eyes, but whether this bias is automatic or volitional is unclear. To discriminate between these two possibilities, we used a "don't look" (DL) paradigm. Participants looked at a series of upright or inverted faces, and were asked either to freely view the faces or to avoid looking at the eyes, or as a control, the mouth. As previously demonstrated, participants showed a bias to attend to both eyes and mouths during free viewing. In the DL condition, participants told to avoid the eyes of upright faces were unable to fully suppress the tendency to fixate on the faces' eyes, whereas participants told to avoid the mouth of upright faces successfully eliminated their bias to overtly attend to that feature. When faces were inverted, participants were equally able to suppress looks to the eyes and mouth. Together, these results suggest that the tendency to look at the eyes reflects orienting that is both volitional and automatic, and that the engagement of holistic or configural face processing mechanisms during upright face viewing has an influence in guiding gaze automatically to the eyes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Workload and stress in vigilance: the impact of display format and task type

Signal salience was manipulated using configural and object displays to examine their effects on the performance, workload, and stress of vigilance. Improving performance and reducing the workload and stress of vigilance are crucial concerns. Signal salience improves performance and reduces stress, but to date there have been no salience manipulations using configural displays in a vigilance task. Two task types (individual variable monitoring and midpoint identification) and 3 display formats (bar graph-different baselines, bar graph-common baseline, and a polygon graph display) were examined. Configural displays improved performance in the midpoint identification task but not in the individual variable monitoring task. Workload depended on the form of display features (bar graph vs. polygon). Stress increased across all conditions, but task and display format did not affect stress. The midpoint identification task was associated with more emotion-focused and avoidant coping. Increasing signal salience in a vigilance task using configural displays with emergent features or physical contours can improve performance and reduce the decrement. These displays may not reduce the stress of vigilance or encourage task-focused coping. Therefore, there may be hidden costs to vigilance performance even when highly salient configural displays are used.     

The threat of logical inversion and our need for philosophical attention: from thought-expression to discourse and discussion

Thought-expressions are not simply good; instead, they become good for us when they make sense, empower action, and support health. From time to time, we may need to (re)consider the difference between thought-expression and discourse, or thought-expression that really makes sense, and the difference between discourse and discussion, or a discourse-situation that makes genuine agreement or disagreement possible for us. In this essay, I explore a problem that D. Z. Phillips and Randy Ramal have termed “logical inversion,” and I argue that wherever logical inversions have gained a foothold in our thought-expressions, they threaten to render us incapable of authentic discourse and discussion by ensuring that we misunderstand the understandings of others such that we deceive ourselves and others by picturing the knowledge and truth of our perspective against an unreal background of conceivable falsehoods which we have falsely attributed to the perspectives of others. Where this has taken place, practices of philosophical attention and conceptual clarification are needed to help us move from a situation of endless thought expression toward authentic discourse and discussion.