The influence of attention upon anticipatory arousal,habituation, and reactivity to a noxious stimulus

Forty subjects were assigned to four groups, an External-attending Group, an Internal-attending Group, a Control Group, and a Distracted Group. All groups were presented with six trials of a 0.5-sec 110-db white noise. A measure of heart rate deceleration verified the experimental manipulation of attention. During the anticipatory period, the Internal-attending Group exhibited the greatest and the Distracted Group exhibited the least reactivity among the four groups. The two specially attending groups exhibited greater galvanic skin-response conditioning during the anticipatory period than the other groups. There was no support for the hypothesis that heightened attention facilitates habituation. Two measures were differentially sensitive to direction of attention during the anticipatory period. The External-attending Group exhibited reliably greater anticipatory deceleration of heart rate than the Internal-attending Group, while the Internal-attending Group exhibited reliably more nonspecific electrodermal responses than the External-attending Group. This latter finding, along with other evidence, suggests that an inward direction of attention tends to exacerbate anticipatory anxiety as well as reactivity to the impact of a noxious stimulus.