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Distress Intolerance Moderation of Attention to Emotion: An Eye-Tracking Study

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Abstract

Distress intolerance (DI) is an important individual difference reflective of the inability to endure aversive affective states and is relevant to multiple clinical populations, but underlying emotional processing mechanisms remain unclear. The current study used eye-tracking to examine biased attention towards emotional stimuli at baseline and in the context of acute stress in a non-clinical sample (N = 165). We hypothesized that DI would incrementally predict greater stressor-elicited increases in sustained/delayed disengagement, but not initial orientation/facilitated engagement negative (i.e., threat, dysphoric) attention biases, and that DI’s association with maladaptive stress regulation would depend on these increases. Partially consistent with predictions, DI was only independently associated with stressor-elicited increases in sustained negative bias and, unexpectedly, decreases in sustained positive bias. Further, DI and change in sustained threat bias marginally interacted to predict cardiovascular but not subjective anxious mood recovery. Theoretical implications are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Manipulation check analyses have also been published in Macatee et al., 2017a, 2017b.

  2. Exploratory models were conducted for baseline and stress sustained attention biases separately. The DI*Emotion interaction was non-significant at baseline, F(2,116) = 0.19, p = .83, but was significant after the stress induction, F(2,113) = 6.99, p = .001, indicating that DI was linked with sustained attention biases to emotional stimuli only in the context of acute stress.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Florida State University, 1107 W. Call Street, P. O. Box 3064301, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, USA

    Richard J. Macatee, Katherine A. McDermott, Brian J. Albanese, Norman B. Schmidt & Jesse R. Cougle

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  1. Richard J. Macatee
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  2. Katherine A. McDermott
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  3. Brian J. Albanese
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  4. Norman B. Schmidt
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Correspondence to Jesse R. Cougle.

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Richard J. Macatee, Katherine A. McDermott, Brian J. Albanese, Norman B. Schmidt, and Jesse R. Cougle declares that they have no conflicts of interest.

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Macatee, R.J., McDermott, K.A., Albanese, B.J. et al. Distress Intolerance Moderation of Attention to Emotion: An Eye-Tracking Study. Cogn Ther Res 42, 48–62 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-017-9869-2

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