Abstract
Anxiety is reliably associated with an attentional bias favoring threatening information which is thought to be a key mechanism in the etiology and maintenance of anxious pathology. However, whether and how anxiety is related to attentional capture at a more basic level (i.e., in the absence of threat) is less well understood. To address this gap in the literature, we examined the association between anxiety and attentional capture in the context of visually salient, yet affectively neutral, stimuli. Specifically, we used a visual search task in which participants were required to locate a target while ignoring a salient distractor stimulus. A total of 122 undergraduates—half of whom were assigned to a state-anxiety induction—completed this task while event-related potentials were recorded and also completed self-report measures of trait and state anxiety. The results revealed that trait anxiety, but not state anxiety, was associated with impaired attentional control in the presence of a salient distractor. That is, behavioral slowing and the N2pc event-related potential—a neural measure of attentional selection—were enhanced for trait-anxious participants when the distractor was proximate to the target and required controlled attention in order to inhibit it. These findings extend previous work by providing evidence from multiple levels of analysis that attentional aberrations in anxiety reflect broad deficits in inhibiting distracting stimuli and are not limited to threat-relevant contexts.
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Notes
Referring to both the RT and N2pc as “distractors costs” is a convenience to aid in the reading of this text; it is not to imply a relationship between these measures or to posit a theoretical explanation for the effect of distractors on these measures.
Note that, since the N2pc is a negative deflection, this negative correlation should be interpreted as a positive association. That is, greater anxiety predicted greater N2pc enhancement.
We quantified the N2pc elicited on lateral target/contralateral distractor trials across the entire time window (200–300 ms). However, some authors (Hickey et al., 2006) have divided this time window into two segments: an early segment characterized by a positivity (i.e., target-contralateral activity was less negative because attention was initially allocated to the distal distractor), and a later time window characterized by the standard N2pc effect (greater negativity at target-contralateral sites). On the basis of visual inspection, we divided the contralateral distractor N2pc wave into two segments: 200–240 and 240–300 ms. However, neither of the costs were related to anxiety (ps > .31).
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Moran, T.P., Moser, J.S. The color of anxiety: Neurobehavioral evidence for distraction by perceptually salient stimuli in anxiety. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci 15, 169–179 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-014-0314-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-014-0314-7