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Snake Fear and the Pictorial Emotional Stroop Paradigm

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Abstract

The purpose of this study was to test a novel pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm that required participants to name the colors of filtered images on a computer screen. High (n = 20) and low (n = 20) snake-fearful participants color-named filters covering images of snakes (threat), cows (neutral), bunnies (positive), and blank screens. Each image appeared as if viewed through tinted sunglasses. The results revealed that both groups took longer to name the colors of filters covering bunnies as well as snakes relative to filters covering cows. Intensely snake-fearful individuals (n = 5), however, exhibited additional interference for snake pictures beyond that evoked by bunny pictures. Thus, pictorial cues having positive as well as negative emotional valence disproportionately captured attention. This paradigm shows promise as a nonlexical, ecologically valid approach to evaluating selective processing of emotional cues.

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... These findings were confirmed by others later [19]. Based on these results, the present study was designed to determine which of the two predictions fit the data we would collect, using the pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm [20][21][22]. ...
... A 22-inch monitor connected with a personal computer was placed on a table. An adapted single-trial version of the pictorial emotional Stroop task [20] was used in the present experiment. Participants were told by an experimenter, who had not been notified about the purpose of this study, that they would see a series of colour-filtered pictures and should indicate the colour of each image as quickly as possible via key-press, while ignoring the content of each picture. ...
... To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to systematically test a pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm, using snake images, except for one preliminary study [20]. The purpose of the preliminary study was to develop the experimental protocol. ...
Article
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One of the most prevalent current psychobiological notions about human behaviour and emotion suggests that prioritization of threatening stimuli processing induces deleterious effects on task performance. In order to confirm its relevancy, 108 adults and 25 children were required to name the colour of images of snakes and flowers, using the pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm. When reaction time to answer the colour of each stimulus was measured, its value was found to decrease when snake images were presented when compared with when flower images were presented. Thus, contrary to the expectation from previous emotional Stroop paradigm research, emotions evoked by viewing images of snakes as a biologically relevant threatening stimulus were found to be likely to exert a facilitating rather than interfering effect on making judgements of their colour.
... These categories were used to better differentiate the various emotional impacts of the task on response times. It was used by many authors with various stimuli combinations (Constantine et al., 2001; Thorpe & Salkovskis, 1997). The pictures were found on the Internet and color filtered with Adobe Photoshop 7.0. ...
... Overall, mean response times dropped after treatment (Fig. 2 ), but a more discriminative approach is necessary (Constantine et al., 2001;). An interference effect was calculated, as suggested by Constatine et al. (2001). ...
... Other authors added an additional element to the model, which is the emotional reaction to fear-related stimuli. Indeed, various studies showed that, when emotionally valenced stimuli are presented, response times increase (Constantine et al., 2001; Kindt & Brosschot, 1997; Kindt et al., 1999). Ledoux (1996) offered a tentative model that can be linked to this interference. ...
... These studies indicate that rhesus monkeys are predisposed to fear certain animals but not others. Constantine et al. (2001) demonstrated that positive and negative pictorial cues affect human attention. Particularly, they observed that pictures of snakes provided the greatest amount of interference. ...
... Snakes have figured prominently in the history of mankind and still are important at the present time. In addition to their role in various religions, snakes are able to divert humans' attention (Constantine et al., 2001;; LoBue and DeLoache, 2008) and have been implicated in the development of the mammalian brain (Ohman and Mineka, 2001;Ohman and Mineka, 2003;Ohman, 2005;Ohman, 2007;Isbell, 2006). Due to an irrational, albeit subconscious, fear of snakes many snakes are killed needlessly. ...
... For instance, naming the color of an emotional stimulus takes longer than for a neutral stimulus (Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996). Similarly, when participants are required to discriminate the color border surrounding a picture without reporting the content of the picture, the response to emotional pictures is delayed relative to neutral pictures (Constantine, McNally, & Hornig, 2001;Kolassa, Musial, Mohr, Trippe, & Miltner, 2005)-a phenomenon that is known as the emotional Stroop effect. However, little is known about how emotionally significant stimuli are processed in peri-hand space. ...
... The present experiment used a pictorial emotional Stroop task (Constantine et al., 2001;Kolassa et al., 2005). Participants were required to discriminate the color of the border surrounding a picture without a need to process the emotional content of the picture. ...
Article
The space near the hands, or peri-hand space is a critical multisensory-motor interface between people and the environment. Recent studies have shown that visual processing near the hands is altered compared with stimuli far from the hands. Some results suggest that the changes may be mediated by brain mechanisms involved in evaluating emotional stimuli. Here we show direct evidence for that proposal: we found that both the emotional Stroop effect and the Late Positive Potential (LPP) to unpleasant visual stimuli were enhanced near the hands compared to far from the hands. The results reveal enhanced processing of unpleasant stimuli in peri-hand space, which may facilitate the response to potentially dangerous stimuli.
... Asserting the opposite notion, Charles Darwin (1872) claimed that "a man or animal driven through terror of desperation, is endowed with wonderful strength" and argued that these responses are adaptive because men and animals possessing them are more adept at avoidance when exposed to evolutionarily dangerous stimuli. Recently, Darwin's argument was experimentally confirmed by a study (Shibasaki, Isomura, & Masataka, 2014) in which 108 adults and 25 children were required to name the color of images of snakes and flowers (Constantine, McNally, & Hornig, 2001). The reaction time (RT) to name the color of each stimulus was found to be shorter when snake images were presented as compared to when flower images were presented in both adults and children. ...
... A 22-inch monitor connected to a personal computer was placed on a table. An adapted single-trial version of the pictorial emotional Stroop task (Constantine et al., 2001;Shibasaki et al., 2014;9 was used in the present experiment. Participants were told by an experimenter, who had not been notified about the purpose of this study, that they would see a series of color-filtered images, and they were instructed to indicate the color of each image as quickly as possible via a key-press, while ignoring the content of each image. ...
Article
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Background It is well known that prioritization of the processing of threatening stimuli generally induces deleterious effects on task performance. However, a study recently reported that emotion (possibly fear) evoked by viewing images of snakes exerts a facilitating effect upon making judgments of the images’ color in neurotypical adults and schoolchildren. Here, the author has attempted to confirm the relevance of this notion in children with and without intellectual disability. Methods The author here compared the reaction time required to name the colors of snake and flower images between children with Down syndrome (DS) and mental age matched, typically‐developing (TD) children. Results Snake images were responded to faster than flower images in both the groups, while the children with DS tended to respond more slowly overall. Conclusions As in TD children, negative emotion can have a motivating effect on cognitive processing in children with DS. Some implications of the findings are pointed out with respect to the lower‐level task persistence as a characteristic motivational orientation in children with DS.
... In one of studies [4], four different categories of pictures chosen from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) to investigate impact of threat factors on amigdala, with the help of fMRI method, an activity of amigdala was detected with the same intensity level of threat. In another study [6] that adapted stroop test used with threat factor, the participants with snake fear were asked to find the colors of presented pictures. Participants who have stronger snake fear gave late answer for snake pictures compared to other pictures. ...
... The results of experiments show that there may be direct link between the cognitive learning process and thread effects in association with amigdala the brain fear centre, whose function is the formation and storage of memories associated with fear or other emotions. Threat factor is one of the emotions which affect people's attention stimulating them to focus more quickly [5,6]. Our experiments have strengthened that during the cognitive learning process, especially increasing activity of amigdala under stress and threat causes the release of stress hormones which perform transmission of information to the memory [19]. ...
Conference Paper
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In this paper we investigate the effect of "thread" factor on cognitive learning process by use of virtual graphical domains whose parameters can be chosen in a systematic flexibility. Nowadays, spread of graphical environments in parallel with the technological and communication tools make investigation of learning factors more easier which are in association with such graphical media. In presented study, learning process analyzed by the proposed test involving some subjective graphical elements (fear, object type, etc.) and their stimulant links with "amigdala" the brain fear centre are investigated by artificial intelligence techniques such as Bayesian networks, whose subtle effects are normally not visible to naked eye.
... These studies indicate that rhesus monkeys are predisposed to fear certain animals but not others. Constantine et al. (2001) demonstrated that positive and negative pictorial cues affect human attention. Particularly, they observed that pictures of snakes provided the greatest amount of interference. ...
... Snakes have figured prominently in the history of mankind and still are important at the present time. In addition to their role in various religions, snakes are able to divert humans' attention (Constantine et al., 2001;Blanchette, 2007;LoBue and DeLoache, 2008) and have been implicated in the development of the mammalian brain (Ohman and Mineka, 2001;Ohman and Mineka, 2003;Ohman, 2005;Ohman, 2007;Isbell, 2006). Due to an irrational, albeit subconscious, fear of snakes many snakes are killed needlessly. ...
Article
Full-text available
Snakes have the ability to both fascinate and frighten. Throughout history humans have had an uneasy relationship with serpents. Snakes are important in many religions including the Judeo-Christian tradition, Hinduism, Egyptian and Greek mythology, and Native American religions, among others. This prominence in so many religions may be the result of humans' fear of snakes. Snakes can easily divert attention and produce subconscious fear even in people who are not typically afraid of them. It has also been suggested that snakes helped shape the mammalian brain in regard to the amygdala and vision systems. This fear of snakes has caused many myths to be prominent even today. Snake myths in the United States include tales about hoop snakes, coachwhips, spreading adders, milk snakes, and others. These myths usually show snakes to be harmful creatures and are rarely based on their actual natural history. Human emotions and assumptions are likely the source of most myths. Although myths are perpetuated by ignorance, they can be dispelled through education. Further, fear of snakes is largely irrational and can be overcome.
... The pictorial version of the modified Stroop task has been used in many of the same fields of research where the word-modified Stroop task has been used, albeit in a limited way. Studies include the assessment of attention to facial emotion (Ashwin, Wheelwright and Baron-Cohen, 2006;Heim-Dreger et al., 2006;van Honk et al., 1998van Honk et al., , 1999van Honk et al., , 2000van Honk et al., , 2001 to cocaine-related images (Hester, Dixon and Garavan, 2006) to phobia-related material (Constantine, McNally and Hornig, 2001;Elsesser et al., 2006;Brosschot, 1997, 1999;Kolassa et al., 2005;Lavy and Van den Hout, 1993), as well as towards images related to eating disorders (Stormark and Torkildsen, 2004;Walker et al., 1995). The methodology used has varied across studies. ...
... Elsesser et al., 2006), instead of having a coloured version of the image (e.g. Constantine, McNally and Hornig, 2001;Côté and Bouchard, 2005). ...
Chapter
The Modified Stroop TaskThe Pictorial Modified Stroop TaskStimuli used in the Stroop Task - not Real PeopleCarrying Out the Stroop TaskThe Implicit Association TestIssues with IAT Scoring AlgorithmsCarrying Out the Implicit Association TestsResults of the Stroop TaskResults of the Implicit Association TestComparing the Pictorial Modified Stroop Task and the IATThe Influence of Order on the Observed DataConclusions References
... Therefore, exogenous attention can be understood as an adaptive tool that permits the detection and processing of biologically salient events even when the individual is engaged in a resource-consuming task. Indeed, several experiments show that emotional stimuli (by definition, important for the individual) presented as distracters interfere with the ongoing task (Constantine et al., 2001;Vuilleumier et al., 2001;Eastwood et al., 2003;Carretié et al., 2004aCarretié et al., , 2009Carretié et al., , 2011Doallo et al., 2006;Huang and Luo, 2007;Thomas et al., 2007;Yuan et al., 2007). However, emotional stimuli need to exceed a critical threshold value to capture attention (Mogg and Bradley, 1998;Koster et al., 2004). ...
... As regards scenes, negative pictures elicited the lowest accuracy level. This result is also in line with previous behavioral data showing an advantage of non-facial negative distracter scenes over positive and/or neutral ones to capture attention when participants are engaged in a cognitive task (Constantine et al., 2001;Carretié et al., 2004aCarretié et al., , 2009Carretié et al., , 2011Doallo et al., 2006;Huang and Luo, 2007;Thomas et al., 2007;Yuan et al., 2007). This pattern has been related to the 'negativity bias', a term that describes the fact that danger or harm-related stimuli tend Exogenous attention to faces and scenes SCAN (2012) 5 of 10 to elicit faster and more prominent responses than neutral or positive events (Taylor, 1991;Cacioppo and Gardner, 1999). ...
Article
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The capacity of the two types of non-symbolic emotional stimuli most widely used in research on affective processes, faces and (non-facial) emotional scenes, to capture exogenous attention, was compared. Negative, positive and neutral faces and affective scenes were presented as distracters to 34 participants while they carried out a demanding digit categorization task. Behavioral (reaction times and number of errors) and electrophysiological (event-related potentials-ERPs) indices of exogenous attention were analyzed. Globally, facial expressions and emotional scenes showed similar capabilities to attract exogenous attention. Electrophysiologically, attentional capture was reflected in the P2a component of ERPs at the scalp level, and in left precentral areas at the source level. Negatively charged faces and scenes elicited maximal P2a/precentral gyrus activity. In the case of scenes, this negativity bias was also evident at the behavioral level. Additionally, a specific effect of facial distracters was observed in N170 at the scalp level, and in the fusiform gyrus and inferior parietal lobule at the source level. This effect revealed maximal attention to positive expressions. This facial positivity offset was also observed at the behavioral level. Taken together, the present results indicate that faces and non-facial scenes elicit partially different and, to some extent, complementary exogenous attention mechanisms.
... These participants showed (a) increased N400 amplitudes for the unpleasant condition relative to the neutral one and (b) an interaction between grammaticality and emotionality: While no differences were found between grammatically correct and incorrect trials when adjectives were unpleasant, an inversed LAN effect arose for neutral adjectives (increased amplitudes in the match condition). These unexpected results might be interpreted in terms of a detrimental effect on agreement processing caused by the presence of unpleasant stimuli, in line with prior evidence (Constantine et al., 2001;Pratto & John, 1991;Zsidó et al., 2023). Additionally, Fraga et al. (2021) found that unpleasant words captured the participants' attention very early, evoking larger N100 amplitudes than neutral words. ...
Article
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In recent years, several ERP studies have investigated whether the early computation of agreement is permeable to the emotional content of words. Some studies have reported interactive effects of grammaticality and emotionality in the left anterior negativity (LAN) component, while others have failed to replicate these results. Furthermore, novel findings suggest that grammatical processing can elicit different neural patterns across individuals. In this study, we aim to investigate whether the interaction between grammaticality and emotionality is restricted to participants with a specific neural profile. Sixty‐one female native speakers of Spanish performed an agreement judgment task in noun phrases composed of a determiner, a noun, and an unpleasant or neutral adjective that could agree or disagree in gender with the preceding noun. Our results support the existence of two different brain profiles: negative and positive dominance (individuals showing either larger LAN or larger P600 amplitudes in ungrammatical stimuli than in grammatical ones, respectively). Interestingly, the neural pattern of these two groups diverged at different points along the time course. Thus, the negative dominance group showed grammaticality effects as early as 200 ms, along with parallel and autonomous processing of grammaticality and emotionality at the LAN/N400 time window. Instead, for the positive dominance group an early interaction was found at around 200 ms, evidencing a grammaticality effect that emerged only for unpleasant words. Our findings confirm the role of individual differences in the interplay between grammar and emotion at the neural level and call for the inclusion of this perspective in studies on syntactic processing.
... Despite the known familiarity confound, results from previous research that did not use a familiar other condition have still been interpreted in terms of self-relevance (Cunningham et al., 2008), salience (Arnell et al., 1999), or personal significance of stimuli (Gronau et al., 2003). This shortcoming can be illustrated by considering the investigations conducted by Arnell et al. (1999) and Gronau et al. (2003), who made use of two experimental paradigms that have systematically shown a robust pattern of condition effects across numerous studies (Coltheart, 2010;Coltheart et al., 2006;Constantine et al., 2001;McKenna & Sharma, 1995;Williams et al., 1996): the Repetition Blindness (RB) and the Emotional Stroop (ES) paradigms. In the former study (Arnell et al., 1999), selfprocessing was investigated in the context of RB, an attentional phenomenon occurring when multiple stimuli are shown in quick succession in the same spatial location, using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). ...
Article
Humans are inclined to preferentially process self-related content, referred to as the ‘self-bias’. Different paradigms have been used to study this effect. However, not all paradigms included a familiar other condition (but rather an unfamiliar other condition), needed to differentiate self-specific effects from the impact of familiarity. The primary goal of our study was to test the suitability for studying the self-bias of two paradigms that provide robust measures of saliency effects – i.e. the Repetition Blindness (RB) effect and the Emotional Stroop (ES) interference – while addressing the familiarity confound. We further explored whether self-bias effects were related to autism symptomatology, as a reduced self-bias in autism has been reported in previous research. In an online procedure, 82 adults performed a RB task and an ES task in a counterbalanced order, while being presented with both self- and familiar other-related stimuli. Results of both frequentist and Bayesian analyses did not provide evidence in favor of a specific self-bias on either task: we found no significant modulation of the RB effect, nor of the ES interference, for the own vs. a close other’s name. Moreover, no link with autism symptomatology was found. Tackling a crucial shortcoming from earlier studies, our investigation raises awareness on the importance of accounting for familiarity when investigating self-related processing.
... Crucially, this attentional capture is based upon the items' top-down qualities, usually via a previously learned association, rather than their bottom-up saliency (Field & Cox, 2008;MacLeod, et al., 1986), and crucially, it does not rely on priming. Individuals with issues such as anxiety (Mogg & Bradley, 2005;Rinck, et al., 2003), eating disorders (Smeets, et al., 2008), depression (Gotlib, et al., 2004), chronic pain (Schoth, et al., 2012), speci c phobias (Constantine, et al., 2001) and addiction (Jones, et al, 2006;Yaxley & Zwaan, 2005) all appear to preferentially process items relating to their concerns. Furthermore, more recent research has highlighted that attentional bias is a cognitive phenomenon and exists outside of psychopathological populations (Knight, et al., 2016). ...
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Objective: Despite the notion of extra pair mating interests being controversial in Western societies, it may be that attending to attractive others is an adaptive and automatic process which informs and maintains plasticity in mating strategies. Previous research has examined this though later attentional processes in relation to potential mates. The current study examines this potential adaptive process further by using early attentional capture, which is beyond conscious control, to examine attentional bias towards attractive faces. Methods: In addition to providing self-report measures relevant to extra-pair interests, participants completed two flicker tasks, each comprising a grid of faces of the gender participants indicated they were most attracted to. Half of the faces were rated as attractive and half as unattractive. In one task, an attractive face was substituted for another attractive face, and in the other an unattractive face was substituted for another unattractive face. Change detection latency differences for attractive vs unattractive faces was measured as an indication of attentional bias towards potential mates. Results: Sociosexual desires predicted a quicker response time to attractive faces relative to unattractive faces. Relationship status, sex of the participant, sociosexual attitudes, sociosexual behaviours, and self-reported sexual and romantic interests outside of the primary relationship did not predict response time on the flicker tasks. Conclusions: The results suggest early attentional processes are adaptively biased towards potential mates in a given environment, calibrating and maintaining plasticity in mating strategies. However, this does not necessarily indicate an inclination towards infidelity.
... For example, one study linked positive valence, or more pleasant emotions, to more mutualistic WVOs (Abidin and Jacobs, 2019). A handful of studies have also addressed affective attitudes toward snakes by incorporating measures of fear (Constantine et al., 2001;Öhman et al., 2001;Prokop and Fancovicova, 2013;. However, few studies have addressed a wider range of human emotions other than fear when it comes to perceptions of and subsequent behaviors toward snakes, highlighting and opportunity for future research (Castillo-Huitroń et al., 2020). ...
Article
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Conservation of snakes is influenced by humans’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors toward these often-maligned animals. We investigated public attitudes toward snakes through an online survey of undergraduate students (n = 743) at a large public university in a southeastern U.S. state. We used behavioral intent (i.e., how a person would react if they encountered a snake) to assess tolerance of different snake species. We also examined various predictors of tolerance including demographic attributes and a variety of cognitive (e.g., knowledge, value orientations) and affective (e.g., emotions) social-psychological variables. Tolerance of snakes varied based on whether the snake was venomous or non-venomous: about 36% of students said they were likely to kill venomous snakes they encountered, compared with 9% who said they would kill non-venomous snakes and 21% of students who said they would kill snakes whose identity was uncertain. However, most students (54%) could not distinguish between venomous and non-venomous species. Value orientations and emotions were strong predictors of tolerance for snakes, suggesting snake outreach and management strategies should account for both cognitive and affective antecedents of behavior.
... There has been much debate in the literature regarding emotional Stroop effects in humans, as to which cognitive processes are affected [22,27,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54], leaving interpretation of the results somewhat ambiguous. In some ways, it is not entirely surprising that effects in various studies using the pictorial emotional Stroop task with nonhuman primates are equivocal, because, even in humans, the pictorial version of the task leads to mixed patterns of results, e.g., [55][56][57]. Of course, it is not possible to use the verbal version of the task in nonverbal organisms, so it remains worthwhile to assess the validity of the nonverbal version of the task. ...
Article
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We adapted the emotional Stroop task developed for primates to test whether gorillas would show response slowing for images of ‘negative’ compared to images of ‘positive’ items placed within previously reinforced borders. Three zoo-housed male gorillas participated in six phases of an emotional Stroop paradigm. In Phase One, they learned to select blue borders over yellow borders in a forced choice task presented on the touchscreen. In Phase Two, neutral yellow or blue two-dimensional shapes were placed within the borders. On congruent trials, blue images were presented within both blue and yellow borders. On incongruent trials, yellow images were placed within both blue and yellow borders. We continued to use these trials as control trials in subsequent phases. We predicted that response latencies would be slower and accuracy would be lower on incongruent trials. Although the gorillas responded more quickly to incongruent trials, in contrast to predictions, they were more accurate on congruent trials, consistent with predictions. Therefore, we proceeded with Phase Three in which photographs of images assumed to have positive and negative valences for the gorillas were placed within the borders. On test trials, the same positive or negative image was placed within both borders. In Phase Four, a positive image was paired with a negative image on each trial and the positive image appeared in either the blue (congruent trials) or yellow border (incongruent trials). Phases Five and Six replicated Phases Three and Four with images of novel positive and negative items. The gorillas responded more quickly on congruent trials compared to incongruent trials on test trials but not on control trials throughout Phases 3–6. These findings provide some validation for the emotional Stroop task to test attentional shift with emotionally valenced items.
... Only human stimuli were included in the analysis, separated by image type (adult = men 1 women vs. child = boys 1 girls). The control pictures (cats) were omitted from the analysis (but were used in a post hoc analysis presented in the Supplement) because for our research question, (wild) animal image content was unsuitable for comparison with human images (38)(39)(40). For the counting Stroop, participants were instructed to answer with the number of copies of a presented word. ...
Article
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Background: Pedophilic disorder (PD) entails sexual attraction to pre-pubertal children. A risk factor for committing child sexual abuse in PD is impaired cognitive control. However, the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remain unclear. Methods: We performed a case-control study including 51 self-identified and help-seeking males with PD and 55 matched healthy controls (HC). Functional MRI and a pictorial-modified Stroop task involving computer-generated sexually implicit images were used to measure response time (RT) and brain activation. Increases in RT during the pictorial-modified Stroop task are presumably due to image-induced interference in executive functions required for task performance. Results: In PD, during the presentation of images of children compared with adults, we found increased RT (p = 0.005; 848 ± 92 ms; 826 ± 88 ms), and compared to HC, we found increased activation in the occipital, temporal (bilateral hippocampus), parietal, frontal, cingulate and left insular cortex as well as the caudate (bilaterally), thalamus (mediodorsal), and cerebellum. Conclusions: Presentation of child images was associated with response interference in PD, and increased engagement of brain regions involved in the processing of sexual stimuli, visual perception, self-referential thought, and executive function. We conclude that processing of child images is associated with functional and behavioral alterations in PD.
... Alternatively, emotion-induced slowing could reflect prolonged attentional engagement with the emotional stimuli, and could therefore be similar to what is known as the emotional-Stroop effect, in which responses are slowed when faced with both positive and negative emotionally-salient stimuli, including images (e.g. Constantine et al., 2001). However, if so, then emotion-induced slowing uniquely reveals the temporal dynamics of this effect, because unlike typical Stroop arrangements, here the emotionallysalient image appeared well in advance of the target. ...
Article
Emotionally-salient stimuli can capture attention to their spatial location, even when they are not relevant to a prescribed task. Here we tested whether they can influence the spatial breadth of attention. Experiment 1 tested whether small task-irrelevant emotionally-salient stimuli contracted attentional breadth when the task required a broad focus, while Experiment 2 tested whether large task-irrelevant emotionally-salient stimuli expanded attentional breadth when the task required a narrow focus. Both experiments compared the effect of negative and positive emotionally-salient images against neutral, and examined the role of participants’ self-reported experiences of negative affect. Both experiments revealed slower responses following large emotionally-salient images, an effect unrelated to attentional breadth. Experiment 1 demonstrated an interaction between accuracy and negative affect, such that individuals with high levels of negative affect were less accurate at identifying global targets following both negative and positive small images, but not following neutral small images. This suggests that these small task-irrelevant emotionally-salient images contracted attentional breadth. Experiment 2 suggested that large task-irrelevant emotionally-salient images did not expand attentional breadth. We discuss how these results cannot be explained by existing models of emotion-based effects on attention and cognition, and the important implications they have for the practicalities of model-testing.
... To process the great amount of sensorial stimulation that continuously surrounds the individual a fast and precise brain selection is required in order to identify relevant signals from the environment such as those are important for survival to face them with an appropriate action (e.g., [1]). Growing experimental evidence coming from both electrophysiological [2][3][4][5][6][7] and behavioral studies [8][9][10][11] has consistently shown that threatening information is capable to efficiently attract attentional resources in a rapid and automatic way (i.e., exogenous attention) when these stimuli appeared as distractors in a given visual task (for a review see [12]). ...
Article
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The capture of exogenous attention by negative stimuli has been interpreted as adaptive for survival in a diverse and changing environment. In the present paper, we investigate the neural responses towards two discrete negative emotions with different biological meanings, disgust and fear, and its potential relationships with heart rate variability (HRV) as an index of emotional regulation. With that aim, 30 participants performed a digit categorization task while fear, disgust and neutral distractor pictures were presented. Resting HRV at baseline, behavioral responses, and event-related potentials were recorded. Whereas P1 amplitudes were highest to fear distractors, the disgust stimulation led to augmented P2 amplitudes compared to the rest of distractors. Interestingly, increased N2 amplitudes were also found to disgust distractors, but only in high HRV participants. Neural source estimation data point to the involvement of the insula in this exogenous attentional response to disgust. Additionally, disgust distractors provoked longer reaction times than fear and neutral distractors in the high HRV group. Present findings are interpreted in evolutionary terms suggesting that exogenous attention is captured by negative stimuli following a different time course for fear and disgust. Possible HRV influences on neural mechanisms underlying exogenous attention are discussed considering the potential important role of this variable in emotional regulation processes.
... De hecho se ha propuesto la implicación de redes neurales diferentes para estos procesos, así las estructuras fronto-límbicas y las áreas ventrales de la corteza prefrontal se encargarían del procesamiento emocional, mientras que a la corteza parietal y las áreas dorsolaterales de la corteza prefrontal correspondería el procesamiento atencional (para una revisión, ver Fichtenholtz, Dean, Dillon, Yamasaki, Gregory, y LaBar, 2004). CONDICIONAMIENTO Las palabras han sido los estímulos emocionales más frecuentemente empleados en las tareas atencionales (Constantine, McNally, y Hornig, 2001;Mansell, Clark, Ehlers, y Chen, 1999;Pratto y John, 1991), a pesar de que otros estímulos, como las imágenes (Buodo, Sarlo, y Palomba, 2002;Kindt y Brosschot, 1997, 1999Mogg, McNamara, Powys, Rawlinson, Seiffer, y Bradley, 2000;Öhman, y cols. 2001), puedan tener mayor validez ecológica, sin perjuicio de sus efectos emocionales, tal y como lo indican Kindt y Brosschot (1999) quienes constataron que no existían diferencias significativas en los adultos, al comparar los efectos del uso de palabras vs. Imágenes con contenido emocional (por ejemplo comparando los efectos del uso de la imagen de una araña, frente al uso de la palabra "araña") en una tarea atencional de denominación de color (Stroop). ...
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Una vez presentados los resultados previos obtenidos y tras establecer la justificación y los objetivos de la tesis (capítulo 1), se presentan tres capítulos teóricos, donde se realiza un primer acercamiento desde una perspectiva amplia al estudio de las emociones (capítulo 2), pasando por una revisión histórica de los estudios sobre el Condicionami ... ento Evaluativo (capítulo 3) para terminar concretando el campo de estudio del Condicionamiento Evaluativo y presentando las similitudes y diferencias con respecto al Condicionamiento Evaluativo (capítulo 3). Tras este abordaje teórico, se presentan tres capítulos en donde mediante una metodología experimental se explora alguna de las características distintivas entre el Condicionamiento Evaluativo y el Condicionamiento Clásico, así en el primer experimento se explora la influencia del nivel de familiaridad de los estímulos en el nivel de condicionamiento (capítulo 5), en el segundo experimento se analiza la relevancia de la contingencia estadística en el Condicionamiento Evaluativo (capítulos 6), por su parte, en el tercer experimento, se analiza la influencia del tipo de presentación de las parejas EC-El en el nivel de condicionamiento alcanzado (capítulo 7). A continuación se pasa a emplear una metodología de encuesta para comprobar la validez interna de un cuestionario que evalúa el nivel de estabilidad emocional de los participantes (capítulo 8). Por último se realiza un experimento donde se exploran los efectos diferenciales de las presentaciones supra o subliminal de los Els durante la fase de condicionamiento siendo evaluado mediante medidas de tipo cognitivo, conductuales y fisiológicas (capítulo 9)|
... Their reaction time to detect snake stimuli is shorter Flykt and Caldara, 2006;Rosa et al., 2011), while their reaction time to detect a target stimulus or a change in a scene is longer when a snake picture is present as a distractor (Lipp and Waters, 2007;McGlynn et al., 2008; see also Waters and Lipp, 2008;Waters et al., 2011, for a comparison of both reaction time procedures). People with high fear of snakes also show increased cognitive interference in the Stroop test when confronted with snake-related sentences (Constantine et al., 2001;Wikström et al., 2004). Furthermore, high-fear individuals demonstrate higher skin conductance response (SCR) when confronted with a live snake (McGlynn et al., 1973) or just a snake picture (Flykt et al., 2017), even when these are presented unconsciously (Öhman and Soares, 1994). ...
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This paper continues our previous study in which we examined the respondents’ reaction to two morphologically different snake stimuli categories – one evoking exclusively fear and another evoking exclusively disgust. Here we acquired Likert-type scale scores of fear and disgust evoked by the same snake stimuli by a total of 330 respondents. Moreover, we collected data about the respondents’ age, gender, education, snake fear [Snake Questionnaire (SNAQ)], and disgust propensity [Disgust Scale-Revised (DS-R)], and we analyzed the effect of these variables on the emotional scores (with special focus on snake-fearful respondents). In addition, we collected the SNAQ and DS-R scores from the respondents tested in the previous study using the rank-ordering method to directly compare the results of these two approaches. The results showed that non-fearful respondents give high scores of fear to the fear-eliciting snakes and high scores of disgust to the disgust-eliciting snakes, but they give low scores of the other emotional dimension (disgust/fear) to each. In contrast, snake-fearful respondents not only give higher fear and disgust scores to the respective snake stimuli, but they also give high scores of fear to the disgust-eliciting snakes and high scores of disgust to the fear-eliciting snakes. Both Likert-scale scores and rank-ordering data show that the clear border dividing both snake stimuli categories dissolves when evaluated by the snake-fearful respondents.
... Regarding positive stimuli, the findings of studies on the emotional Stroop effect have been inconsistent. Some studies found the emotional Stroop effect of positive stimuli was significant (e.g., Martin et al., 1991;Constantine et al., 2001), but some other studies have not found this effect (e.g., McKenna and Sharma, 1995;White, 1996;Bertels et al., 2011). However, from an evolutionary perspective of emotion, positive stimuli such as infants and appetizing food or erotic stimuli are positive rewarding stimuli, and acquiring the sources of these stimuli is critical for an organism's survival or reproduction. ...
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Prior research has found significant emotional Stroop effects for negative stimuli, but the results have been inconsistent for positive stimuli. Combining an evolutionary perspective of emotion with the motivational dimensional model of affect, we speculated that the emotional Stroop effect of a stimulus may be influenced by the biological salience and inherent motivational intensity of the stimulus. In the present study, we examined this issue with two experiments. The results indicated that both low- and high-withdrawal-motivation negative stimuli produced a robust emotional Stroop effect; however, the high-withdrawal-motivation negative stimuli produced a stronger emotional Stroop effect than the low-withdrawal-motivation negative stimuli. Regarding positive stimuli, only the high-approach-motivated positive stimuli produced the emotional Stroop effect, unlike the low-approach-motivation positive stimuli. These findings suggest that the emotional Stroop effect is modulated by the biological salience of stimuli and by the motivational intensity inherent in the stimuli. Biological salience and motivational intensity play an additive effect in the emotional Stroop effect.
... That is, they preferentially engage mechanisms of visual attention (but see Purcell and Stewart, 2010, for an alternative explanation). Emotional Stroop paradigms have been used to demonstrate that threatening emotional information interferes with the processing of non-emotional information (e.g., Constantine et al., 2001;Putman et al., 2004). That is, threatening information is difficult to disengage from (but cf. ...
Chapter
Emotion is fundamental to our being, and an essential aspect guiding behavior when rapid responding is required. This includes whether we approach or avoid a stimulus, and the accompanying physiological responses. A common tenet is that threat-related content drives stimulus processing and biases visual attention, so that rapid responding can be initiated. In this paper, it will be argued instead that prioritization of threatening stimuli should be encompassed within a motivational relevance framework. To more fully understand what is, or is not, prioritized for visual processing one must, however, additionally consider: (i)stimulus ambiguity and perceptual saliency; (ii)task demands, including both perceptual load and cognitive load; and (iii)endogenous/affective states of the individual. Combined with motivational relevance, this then leads to a multifactorial approach to understanding the drivers of prioritized visual processing. This accords with current recognition that the brain basis allowing for visual prioritization is also multifactorial, including transient, dynamic and overlapping networks. Taken together, the paper provides a reconceptualization of how “emotional” information prioritizes visual processing.
... This negative media feature also makes viewers' cognitive resources become less available temporarily because the viewer reaction interferes with their cognitive process (e.g. Constantine, McNally, and Hornig 2001). ...
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This current study explores how stereoscopic three-dimensional (3-D) dimensionality affects the process by which viewers’ memory of brand names embedded in a soccer game is formed compared to the memory process in traditional 2-D display. To this end, we conduct two studies: a qualitative observation using an eye tracker; and an experiment to identify the difference and similarity of the viewing process across these two display technologies. Statistical test results reveal that sports involvement enhances viewers’ attention to a sports game, which is moderated by game enjoyment and negative viewing experience generated from the media features. Most importantly, it is found that as viewers pay more attention to a sports game in stereoscopic 3-D display, they are less likely to remember the brands embedded in the stadium, while the opposite is found in 2-D display. More findings and implications are discussed in the discussion section.
... 13 A classic example is the emotional Stroop task, in which naming the color of emotion-laden words and pictures is significantly slower than naming the color of neutral stimuli. 14,15 Such interference is thought to be partly mediated by the irrelevant thoughts elicited by emotional stimuli. 16 In addition, regulating interfering emotions is effortful and consumes cognitive resources. ...
Article
Introduction: Warning labels for cigarettes proposed by FDA were rejected by the courts partly because they were thought to be emotionally evocative but have no educational value. To address this issue, we compared three types of smoking warnings: 1) FDA-proposed warnings with pictures illustrating the smoking hazards; 2) warnings with the same text information paired with equally aversive but smoking-irrelevant images; and 3) text-only warnings. Methods: Smokers recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions. They reported how many cigarettes they smoked per day (CPD) during the past week and then viewed eight different warnings. After viewing each warning, they rated its believability and perceived ability to motivate quitting. One week later, 62.3% of participants again reported CPD during the past week, rated how the warnings they viewed the week before changed their feeling about smoking, rated their intention to quit in the next 30 days, and recalled as much as they could about each of the warnings they viewed. Results: Compared to the irrelevant image and text-only warnings, FDA warnings were seen as more believable and able to motivate quitting and at the follow-up, produced lower CPD, worse feeling about smoking, and more memory for warning information, controlling for age and baseline CPD. Conclusions: Emotionally evocative warning images are not effective in communicating the risks of smoking, unless they pertain to smoking-related hazards. In future versions of warning labels, pictorial contents should be pre-tested for the ability to enhance the health-hazard message. Implications: Our study shows that contrary to court opinions, FDA-proposed pictorial warnings for cigarettes are more effective in communicating smoking-related hazards than warnings that merely contain emotionally aversive but smoking-irrelevant images. The suggestion that FDA's proposed warnings employed emotionally arousing pictures with no information value was not supported. Pictures that illustrate the risk carry information that enhances the persuasiveness of the warning. The congruence between pictures and text should be a criterion for selecting warning images in the future.
... While most people are vigilant for potential threat, the prefix hyper indicates that this vigilance is strongly enhanced in phobia and high levels of fear. Using various paradigms, there is much evidence consistent with the hypothesis that spider phobia is characterized by a hyper-vigilance for or a deeper engagement with fear-relevant stimuli M A N U S C R I P T A C C E P T E D ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 4 (Constantine, McNally & Hornig, 2001;Kindt & Brosschot, 1997;Lavy & van den Hout, 1993;Merckelbach, de Jong, Arntz, & Schouten, 1993;Olatunji, Sawchuk, Lee, Lohr & Tolin, 2008;van den Hout, Tenney, Huygens & de Jong, 1997;Watts, McKenna, Sharrock & Trezise, 1986;Wenzel & Holt, 1999;Wikstrom, Lundh, Westerlund & Hogman, 2004). Using the attentional probe task, Mogg and Bradley (2006) presented pairs of photographs of spiders and cats for 200ms, 500ms or 2000ms to two groups of individuals reporting high or low levels of spider fear. ...
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Attention Bias Modification (ABM) targets attention bias (AB) towards threat and is a potential therapeutic intervention for anxiety. The current study investigated whether initial AB (towards or away from spider images) influenced the effectiveness of ABM in spider fear. AB was assessed with an attentional probe task consisting of spider and neutral images presented simultaneously followed by a probe in spider congruent or spider incongruent locations. Response time (RT) differences between spider and neutral trials > 25 ms was considered 'Bias Toward' threat. RT difference < - 25 ms was considered 'Bias Away' from threat, and a difference between -25 ms and +25 ms was considered 'No Bias'. Participants were categorized into Initial Bias groups using pre-ABM AB scores calculated at the end of the study. 66 participants' (Bias Toward n = 27, Bias Away n = 18, No Bias n = 21) were randomly assigned to ABM-active training designed to reduce or eliminate a bias toward threat and 61 (Bias Toward n = 17, Bias Away n = 18, No Bias n = 26) to ABM-control. ABM-active had the largest impact on those demonstrating an initial Bias Towards spider images in terms of changing AB and reducing Spider Fear Vulnerability, with the Bias Away group experiencing least benefit from ABM. However, all Initial Bias groups benefited equally from active ABM in a Stress Task. Participants were high spider fearful but not formally diagnosed with a specific phobia. Therefore, results should be confirmed within a clinical population. Individual differences in Initial Bias may be an important determinant of ABM efficacy. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.
... As other anxiety disorders, these phobias go together with changes in information processing, resulting in so-called cognitive biases, which favor the processing of fear-related information (Koster, Fox, & MacLeod, 2009;Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1997). In fear of spiders and fear of snakes, an attention bias for the feared animal is the most prominent cognitive bias; it was found using the emotional Stroop task (Constantine, McNally, & Hornig, 2001), search tasks (Rinck, Reinecke, Ellwart, Heuer, & Becker, 2005), free viewing tasks , and the dot-probe task (Lipp & Derakshan, 2005;Mogg & Bradley, 2006). ...
Article
Attention Bias Modification (ABM) is used to manipulate attention biases in anxiety disorders. It has been successful in reducing attention biases and anxious symptoms in social anxiety and generalized anxiety, but not yet in specific fears and phobias. We designed a new version of the dot-probe training task, aiming to train fearful participants' attention away from or towards pictures of threatening stimuli. Moreover, we studied whether the training also affected participants' avoidance behavior and their physical arousal upon being confronted with a real threat object. In Experiment 1, students with fear of spiders were trained. We found that the attention manipulation was successful, but the training failed to affect behavior or arousal. In Experiment 2, the same procedure was used on snake-fearful students. Again, attention was trained in the expected directions. Moreover, participants whose attention had been trained away from snakes showed lower physiological arousal upon being confronted with a real snake. The study involved healthy students with normal distribution of the fear of spider/snake. Future research with clinical sample could help with determining the generalizability of the current findings. The effect of ABM on specific phobia is still in question. The finding in the present study suggested the possibility to alter attentional bias with a dot-probe task with general positive stimuli and this training could even affect the behavior while encountering a real threat. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
... Poczucie jednoĞci z naturą, wszechĞwiatem czy ludzkoĞcią – zgodnie z doniesieniami na temat efektów praktyk duchowych – moĪe przejawiaü siĊ pozytywnymi stanami afektywnymi. Skądinąd wiadomo, Īe wzbudzone emocje zwiĊkszają czujnoĞü uwagi i kierują jej zasoby na Ĩródło emocji (Constantine, McNally i Hornig, 2001). Zjawisko to skutkuje lepszym zapamiĊtywaniem bodĨców afektywnych (Christianson, 1992; LaBar i Phelps, 1998). ...
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Celem prezentowanego artykułu było ukazanie istnienia reprezentacji umysłowych duchowości oraz możliwości aktywizacji tych reprezentacji poprzez transcendencję poza Ja, zdefiniowaną jako perspektywa noetyczna. Przedstawiono wyniki trzech eksperymentów z udziałem studentów (N = 186), w paradygmacie decyzji leksykalnych (LDT). W dwóch z nich testowano ponadto głębokość przetwarzania informacji, mierzoną za pomocą testu pamięciowego. Nie potwierdzono wyniku typowego dla procedury LDT – perspektywa noetyczna nie powodowała szybszego rozpoznawania słów z nią powiązanych niĪ słów z nią niepowiązanych. Natomiast aktywizacja perspektywy noetycznej w warunku zaangażowania uwagi przejawiła się lepszym zapamiętaniem zaktywizowanych przez nią treści oraz transferem pozytywnego afektu na skojarzone z nią obiekty.
... Studies in which emotional distractors and targets receiving endogenous attention are not physically segregated-such as those exploring the emotional Stroop effect (i.e., the categorization of the ink color in which the word is written is interfered with by its emotional content; e.g., Constantine, McNally & Hornig, 2001;Thomas, Johnstone & Gonsalvez, 2007), those using affective lexical decision tasks (word/pseudoword categorization is interfered with by the emotional content; e.g., Gutiérrez & Calvo, 2011;Kanske & Kotz, 2007;Kuchinke, Jacobs, Grubich, Vo et al., 2005), or those using tasks where specific nonemotional elements or categories (e.g., gender) within a face or scene have to be detected (detection is interfered with by the emotional content of the picture; e.g., Critchley, Daly, Phillips, Brammer et al., 2000;Eastwood, Smilek & Merikle, 2003;Morris, Friston, Büchel, Frith et al., 1998;Rellecke, Palazova, Sommer & Schacht, 2011;Simpson, Ongür, Akbudak, Conturo et al., 2000)-do not trigger evident spatial, VAN/DAN-related reorienting mechanisms, so that they will not be included. However, it is important to note that, globally, such studies yield results that are closely in line with those reviewed here, indicating greater interference of emotional content than of neutral content. ...
Article
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Current knowledge on the architecture of exogenous attention (also called automatic, bottom-up, or stimulus-driven attention, among other terms) has been mainly obtained from studies employing neutral, anodyne stimuli. Since, from an evolutionary perspective, exogenous attention can be understood as an adaptive tool for rapidly detecting salient events, reorienting processing resources to them, and enhancing processing mechanisms, emotional events (which are, by definition, salient for the individual) would seem crucial to a comprehensive understanding of this process. This review, focusing on the visual modality, describes 55 experiments in which both emotional and neutral irrelevant distractors are presented at the same time as ongoing task targets. Qualitative and, when possible, meta-analytic descriptions of results are provided. The most conspicuous result is that, as confirmed by behavioral and/or neural indices, emotional distractors capture exogenous attention to a significantly greater extent than do neutral distractors. The modulatory effects of the nature of distractors capturing attention, of the ongoing task characteristics, and of individual differences, previously proposed as mediating factors, are also described. Additionally, studies reviewed here provide temporal and spatial information-partially absent in traditional cognitive models-on the neural basis of preattention/evaluation, reorienting, and sensory amplification, the main subprocesses involved in exogenous attention. A model integrating these different levels of information is proposed. The present review, which reveals that there are several key issues for which experimental data are surprisingly scarce, confirms the relevance of including emotional distractors in studies on exogenous attention.
... Allerdings lässt sich bei verschiedenen Varianten von emotionalen Stroop-Aufgaben (für einen Überblick siehe Williams et al., 1997) kein konsistenter attentional bias für phobierelevante Bilder nachweisen (z. B. Merckelbach, Kenemans, Dijkstra & Schouten, 1993;Kindt, Bierman & Brosschot, 1997;Constantine, McNally & Hornig, 2001;Kolassa, Musial, Mohr, Hecht, Trippe & Miltner, 2005; Das Auftreten bzw. das Ausmaß von Aufmerksamkeitsanomalien ist offenbar abhängig von spezifischen experimentellen Bedingungen, die bislang nur teilweise systematisch aufgeklärt wurden (siehe dazu u. a. MacLeod, 1991;Kindt & van den Hout, 2001;Sharma & McKenna, 2001). ...
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Zusammenfassung. Der verstärkte Einsatz bildgebender Verfahren, wie z. B. der funktionellen Magnetresonanztomogra- phie, hat in den letzten Jahren zu zahlreichen Befunden geführt, die unser Wissen über die neuronalen Grundlagen der normalen und pathologischen Verarbeitung bedrohungsrelevanter Reize erweitert haben. Bei Phobikern konnten dadurch unter anderem Gehirnareale genauer identifiziert werden, die an der automatischen und kontrollierten Stimulusverarbeitung beteiligt sind. Die mittels funktioneller Bildgebung und elektrophysiologischer Methoden aufgezeigten zentralnervösen Aktivierungsmuster können nicht nur zu einem besseren Verständnis der neuronalen Basis von Angststörungen, sondern auch zur neurobiologi- schen Fundierung von Psychotherapieeffekten beitragen. Im vorliegenden Artikel werden aktuelle Befunde zur Gehirnaktivie- rung während der Verarbeitung von Bedrohungsreizen bei Gesunden und Phobikern dargestellt und im Rahmen gegenwärtiger Modellvorstellungen diskutiert. m m m m Schlüsselwörter: fMRT, Phobie, Bedrohung, Amygdala, Furcht Neural correlates of the processing of threat-relevant stimuli in phobics and healthy subjects Abstract. The increasing use of neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, resulted in numer- ous new findings, which extended the knowledge regarding the neuronal basis of normal and pathological processing of threat- relevant stimuli. This research identified brain areas, which are involved in automatic and controlled information processing in phobic subjects. The results provided by functional imaging and electrophysiological methods led to a deeper understanding of the neural basis of both the symptoms of anxiety disorders and the success of psychotherapeutic treatment. In this article, we review and discuss current models of fear elicitation and new findings on brain activation patterns during threat processing in healthy subjects and phobics.
... The purpose of the present experiment was to test whether children and adolescents with anxiety disorders, relative to healthy control participants, exhibit delayed colour naming of threat-related faces of children and adults in a variant of the pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm. Modifying our previous version of the pictorial Stroop (Constantine, McNally, & Hornig, 2001), we asked participants to name the colours of filters covering pictures of adults and children displaying either an emotionally neutral facial expression or an expression depicting anger, disgust, or happiness. Psychologists have increasingly utilised facial expressions of emotion as ecologically valid stimuli having potential evolutionary significance in attentional bias research on adults (e.g., Mansell, Clark, Ehlers, & Chen, 1999). ...
Article
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The purpose of this study was to test whether children and adolescents with anxiety disorders exhibit selective processing of threatening facial expressions in a pictorial version of the emotional Stroop paradigm. Participants named the colours of filters covering images of adults and children displaying either a neutral facial expression or one displaying the emotions of anger, disgust, or happiness. A delay in naming the colour of a filter implies attentional capture by the facial expression. Anxious participants, relative to control participants, exhibited slower colour naming overall, implying greater proneness to distraction by social cues. Children exhibited longer colour-naming latencies as compared to adolescents, perhaps because young children have a limited ability to inhibit attention to distracting stimuli. Adult faces were associated with slower colour naming than were child faces, irrespective of facial expressions in both groups, possibly because adults provide especially salient cues for children and adolescents. Inconsistent with prediction, participants with anxiety disorders were not slower than healthy controls at naming the colours of filters covering threatening expressions (i.e., anger and disgust) relative to filters covering faces depicting happy or neutral expressions.
... Moreover, they located an angry face among a set of faces with an expression of happiness more quickly than vice versa (Hansen & Hansen, 1988;Öhman et al., 2001). Nonetheless, Constantine, McNally, and Hornig (2001) employing an emotional Stroop's task, found that pictures of both snakes and bunnies elicited greater response latencies than pictures of cows, and that there were no differences between snakes and bunnies. Nor have other studies found any differences in the attentional resources devoted to processing stimuli such as snakes and spiders, as opposed to neutral stimuli, even when the participants demonstrated a phobia towards these types of stimuli (e.g. ...
Article
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Se llevaron a cabo tres experimentos para evaluar la atención a palabras de diferente valor emocional. Se trabajó con un paradigma experimental de doble tarea, registrando los tiempos de respuesta ante tonos, los cuales fueron presentados durante la lectura de palabras. El recuerdo también fue evaluado a través de una prueba de memoria intencional inmediata. Los resultados revelan que ni el valor, ni la excitación de las palabras, afectan la atención de los participantes. Solamente, en el tercer experimento, en el que las palabras pertenecieron a dos categorías semánticas específicas (sexual y riesgo de muerte) las mujeres mostraron significativamente mayor RTS ante palabras amenazadoras. No obstante, se observaron diferencias significativas en el recuerdo inmediato posterior, para los diferentes tipos de palabras en los tres experimentos. Los estudios futuros deben tener en cuenta: ( a) la situación diferencial de las palabras e imágenes para captar la atención, (b) la influencia diferencial de valencia, así como la excitación, en el recuerdo de palabras emocionales y (c) los efectos diferenciales de la categoría semántica de la atención prestada a estas palabras de hombres y mujeres.
... A functionalist perspective holds that cognitive and perceptual systems are designed to be particularly sensitive to input indicative of an adaptive challenge (Gibson, 1979; Maner et al., 2003; Ohman & Mineka, 2001). Several laboratories have successfully examined selective attention for other ecologically relevant categories, such as threat stimuli (Constantine, McNally, & Hornig, 2001; Hansen & Hansen, 1988; Ohman & Mineka, 2001). Attentional bias is theoretically modulated by underlying motivational systems, which can vary in valence across time and environmental circumstances and between individuals (Bauer & Cox, 1998; Bradley, Mogg, Wright, & Field, 2003; Stetter et al., 1994). ...
Article
The current study investigated whether women show an attentional bias toward courtship language during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. Thirty heterosexual women (17 naturally cycling, 13 using hormonal contraceptives) completed a dichotic listening task on both a high and low fertility day of their menstrual cycle. Participants were asked to verbally repeat (shadow) an emotionally neutral target passage played in one ear while either a neutral or courtship distracter was played in the other ear. Courtship distracters were flirtatious in content but not overtly sexual. Shadowing errors were coded as a measure of attentional bias toward the distracter. Saliva samples were taken to determine whether levels of estradiol, progesterone and/or testosterone correlated with task performance. As predicted, naturally cycling women made more shadowing errors when listening to a courtship distracter during the fertile phase of their cycle than during the nonfertile phase. This effect was moderated by relationship status, such that fertile, mated women showed an attentional bias for courtship language but fertile single women did not. However, because of small sample sizes in the analysis, this relationship should be viewed as preliminary. Hormonal analysis revealed that higher levels of salivary estradiol predicted greater attentional bias toward courtship language in naturally cycling women. These results suggest that women's attention is drawn to verbal courtship signals when they are fertile, and that this shift is linked to increased estradiol release during the periovulatory phase.
... If the relevant and irrelevant feature are not integrated the picture content might be too easily ignored, reducing interference effects (e.g., Kindt & Brosschot, 1999 ). For this reason recent experiments in the context of emotional Stroop research employed a colour filter over the pictorial stimuli as the relevant feature (e.g., Constantine, McNally, & Hornig, 2001), rather than using stimuli consisting of separate relevant (e.g., a coloured dot or frame) and irrelevant (e.g., a picture of a spider) task features (e.g., Lavy & van den Hout, 1993). However, using a colour filter may undermine the strength (and/or validity) of the task-irrelevant stimulus feature. ...
Article
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There is a range of concepts that are relevant to emotion research that may not be readily captured in words. Therefore, this experiment tested whether the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST: De Houwer, 2003) can be modified to assess automatic affect using pictorial stimuli. In addition, since the EAST is a relatively complex task, we tested whether the EAST can also be success-fully employed in community samples. Participants (n = 60) who varied con-siderably in age and educational level completed a pictorial version of the EAST. Results show that the pictorial EAST is sensitive to the valence of pic-torial stimuli and has an acceptable reliability. However, this pattern of results emerged most clearly in the error data. A task-shifting account for these find-ings is discussed. The findings underline the potential usefulness of the EAST as a tool for assessing automatic affect, but urge caution with interpreting data that include high error rates.
... Smaller but possibly meaningful differences do not become statistically significant. Moreover, already several former studies doubted the use of words as stimuli, because words might not be strong enough to elicit significant attentional biases, especially in pain patients323334. Also, the words we used in the present study were general affective words. The use of words that reflect the common migraine triggers more specifically might lead to more pronounced effects. ...
Article
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"Negative affect" is one of the major migraine triggers. The aim of the study was to assess attentional biases for negative affective stimuli that might be related to migraine triggers in migraine patients with either few or frequent migraine and healthy controls. Thirty-three subjects with frequent migraine (FM) or with less frequent episodic migraine, and 20 healthy controls conducted two emotional Stroop tasks in the interictal period. In task 1, general affective words and in task 2, pictures of affective faces (angry, neutral, happy) were used. For each task we calculated two emotional Stroop indices. Groups were compared using one-way ANOVAs. The expected attentional bias in migraine patients was not found. However, in task 2 the controls showed a significant attentional bias to negative faces, whereas the FM group showed indices near zero. Thus, the FM group responded faster to negative than to positive stimuli. The difference between the groups was statistically significant. The findings in the FM group may reflect a learned avoidance mechanism away from affective migraine triggers.
... However, in our review of emotional, pictorial versions of the Stroop test, we realized that most studies used black-andwhite or mono-colored photos (e.g., Bruce & Jones, 2004;Constantine, McNally, & Horning, 2001;Harrison, Sullivan, Tchanturia, & Treasure, 2010;Walker et al., 1995). Searching PubMed at the time of writing this article, we found that only four of 56 eating-related Stroop studies used pictorial stimuli, which where mono-colored pictures. ...
Article
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There are methodological complexities with the supraliminal-lexical versions of the modified versions of the Stroop tests that could be responsible for inconsistencies across the literature (Field & Cox, 2008). We tested whether a combination of subliminal-pictorial and classic Stroop tests can differentiate between dieters' and nondieters' food attentional bias (FAB). Participants were dieters (n = 30) and nondieters (n = 32) who were tested 3 hr after having a meal. Each picture from among 24 high-calorie and 24 low-calorie food pictures was presented for 32 ms before the appearance of a congruent or an incongruent color word, in response to which participants were required to manually report, via a tagged keyboard, the correct color of the word as quickly and accurately as possible. Color-naming latencies and interference scores were calculated. Dieters showed the highest reaction times to incongruent color words following high-calorie food pictures; overall, dieters showed significantly higher FABs than nondieters. The Combi-Stroop test has differential validity. Moreover, findings suggest that FAB can result from early allocation of dieters' attention to food-related stimuli.
... Negatively arousing visual stimuli have been shown to efficiently attract exogenous attention (also termed automatic or bottom-up attention), as revealed by electrophysiological and behavioral responses to emotional distracters while subjects are engaged in a cognitive task (Carretié et al., 2008(Carretié et al., , 2004(Carretié et al., , 2009bConstantine et al., 2001;Doallo et al., 2006;Huang and Luo, 2007;Thomas et al., 2007;Vuilleumier et al., 2001;Yuan et al., 2007). This ability to automatically capture attention has obvious adaptive and evolutionary advantages: the consequences of not detecting a negative event are often much more dramatic than the consequences of ignoring or reacting slowly to neutral or even appetitive stimuli. ...
Article
Negative stimuli have consistently been shown to efficiently attract exogenous attention. Two different types of unpleasant stimuli, disgusting and fearful, sharing similar arousal and valence, are usually employed as a single category. However, since they diverge in several important aspects (biological functionality, associated feelings, and central and peripheral physiological correlates), it may be expected that their potential to capture attention differs. Event-related potentials and behavioral indices were recorded while participants were engaged in a digit categorization task in response to three types of irrelevant, distracting pictures: disgusting, fearful and neutral. Disgusting trials were associated with worse performance than fearful trials in the digit categorization task as revealed by reaction times and number of errors. Moreover, P2-associated cuneus activation and scalp anterior P2 amplitude were greater for disgusting than for fearful distracters. All these indices reveal that, under the experimental conditions employed in the present study, disgusting distracters are more efficient at attracting exogenous attention than are fearful distracters.
Thesis
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Living in a complex social environment requires primates to manage their emotions and inhibit impulsive behaviours. The cognitive processes that underpin these behaviours, crucial in many aspects of everyday life, are defined as inhibitory control. In animal studies, the various paradigms designed to measure inhibitory control often suffer from a lack of systematic validation. Moreover, striking individual variations in inhibitory control performances are often largely ignored and their causes rarely considered. Finally, little is known about the selective forces that shape the evolution of inhibitory control. It has been suggested that one route by which this ability can be enhanced is through selection on social tolerance. Hence the aim of this project was threefold: 1-to develop a battery of inhibitory control tasks in non-human primates 2-to use this task battery to systematically investigate individual variability and its most common causes 3-on a broader evolutionary scale, to compare the inhibitory control skills in three species which differ in social tolerance style. For that purpose, we tested 66 macaques (28 Macaca mulatta, 19 M. fascicularis and 18 M. tonkeana) in a battery of touchscreen tasks assessing three main components of inhibitory control: inhibition of a distraction (using a Distraction task), inhibition of an impulsive action (using a Go/No-go task) and inhibition of a cognitive set (using a Reversal learning task). We found that all tasks were reliable and effective at measuring the inhibition of an impulsive and automatic response. We then demonstrated individual variations, sex and age differences in inhibitory control performances. Finally we demonstrated that the least tolerant species were poorer at controlling their emotions and impulsions compared to other species. Overall, this project will help to get more insight into the multifaceted structure and the evolution of inhibitory control in primates.
Chapter
Specific phobia (SP) used to be called “simple phobia” in earlier editions of the DSM (Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). The chapter points out changes in defining criteria over the various DSM editions. Etiological factors including genetic and temperaments such as disgust sensitivity are discussed. Learning theory including associative and nonassociative models of specific phobia are examined. Cognitive biases that facilitate the maintenance of the disorder such as attentional and judgment biases are explained. The neural correlates of specific phobia are assessed based on functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging studies. Electrophysiological correlates are also reviewed including P1, N1, N2pc, P3, and LPP.
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Contextual victims are those individuals who are indirectly traumatized by the physical and sociocultural conditions of their violent communities through secondhand information. The purpose of this study was to examine the inhibitory control to violent stimuli in contextual victims from the city of Juárez, Mexico. A pictorial violence-Stroop was constructed with violent, positive, and neutral images. Forty-six university students with low (n = 22) and high (n = 24) scores on the Community Victimization by Community Violence Questionnaire participated. The study adopted a 2 (group = high contextual victims and low contextual victims) × 3 (stimulus type = violent, positive, and neutral) factorial design with repeated measures on the second factor. There were two signi cant e ects which favored the low-context compared with the high-context victimization group, notably faster reaction times in the violent stimulus condition (968.93 vs. 1136.26 ms; H = 5.031; p = .024) and the neutral stimulus condition (899.68 vs. 1013 ms; H = 5.130; p = .025). Results suggest that individuals who are highly exposed to contextual violence may be more sensitive towards violent stimuli, and that their performance on inhibitory tasks that include violence as a distractor cue may be more cognitively demanding.
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The emotional Stroop task is an experimental paradigm developed to study the relationship between emotion and cognition. Human participants required to identify the color of words typically respond more slowly to negative than to neutral words (emotional Stroop effect). Here we investigated whether chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) would show a comparable effect. Using a touch screen, eight chimpanzees were trained to choose between two simultaneously presented stimuli based on color (two identical images with differently colored frames). In Experiment 1, the images within the color frames were shapes that were either of the same color as the surrounding frame or of the alternative color. Subjects made fewer errors and responded faster when shapes were of the same color as the frame surrounding them than when they were not, evidencing that embedded images affected target selection. Experiment 2, a modified version of the emotional Stroop task, presented subjects with four different categories of novel images: three categories of pictures of humans (veterinarian, caretaker, and stranger), and control stimuli showing a white square. Because visits by the veterinarian that include anaesthetization can be stressful for subjects, we expected impaired performance in trials presenting images of the veterinarian. For the first session, we found correct responses to be indeed slower in trials of this category. This effect was more pronounced for subjects whose last anaesthetization experience was more recent, indicating that emotional valence caused the slowdown. We propose our modified emotional Stroop task as a simple method to explore which emotional stimuli affect cognitive performance in nonhuman primates.
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Attentional control settings have an important role in guiding visual behaviour. Previous work within cognitive psychology has found the deployment of general attentional control settings can be modulated by training. However, research has not yet established whether long-term modifications of one particular type of attentional control setting can be induced. To address this, we investigated persistent alterations to Feature Search Mode, also known as an attentional bias, towards an arbitrary stimulus in healthy participants. Subjects were biased towards the colour green by an information sheet. Attentional bias was assessed using a change detection task. After an interval of either 1 or 2 weeks participants were then either re-tested on the same change detection task, tested on a different change detection task where colour was irrelevant, or were biased towards an alternative colour. One experiment included trials in which the distracter stimuli (but never the target stimuli) were green. The key finding was that green stimuli in the second task attracted attention, despite this impairing task performance. Furthermore, inducing a second attentional bias did not override the initial bias toward green objects. The attentional bias also persisted for at least two weeks. It is argued that this persistent attentional bias is mediated by a chronic change to participants attentional control settings, which is aided by long-term representations involving contextual cuing. We speculate that similar changes to attentional control settings and continuous cuing may relate to attentional biases observed in psychopathologies. Targeting these biases may be a productive approach to treatment.
Book
Jahrzehntelang waren Kognitions- und Emotionspsychologie zwei Welten mit unterschiedlichen Fragestellungen und unterschiedlichen Methoden. Die übergeordnete Frage, der man jedoch in letzter Zeit innerhalb der Psychologie nachgeht, ist, wie ein denkender Organismus möglichst erfolgreich in einer komplexen Umwelt, die aus Gefahren und Chancen besteht, handeln kann. Affektive Reize stellen hierbei saliente Hinweise auf Gefahren und Chancen, also auf Ereignisse, die den eigenen Zielen entgegenstehen bzw. förderlich für diese sind, dar. Eine schnelle und bevorzugte Verarbeitung von affektiven Reizen wäre demnach mit einem effektiven und erfolgreichen Handeln in der Umwelt verbunden. Kognitions- und emotionspsychologische Fragen fließen hier zusammen. In jüngerer Zeit werden deshalb immer mehr Paradigmen der klassischen kognitiven Psychologie eingesetzt, um die (spezielle) Verarbeitung affektiver Reize zu untersuchen. Im Buch werden einige der ursprünglich kognitiven Paradigmen, die inzwischen eingesetzt werden, um die Verarbeitung affektiver Reize zu untersuchen, detailliert und sehr systematisch vorgestellt.
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The aim of the present research was to investigate the cognitive representations of the noetic perspective (spirituality) and the influence of the activation of these representations on information processing. The article presents the results of three experiments on groups of students (N = 186), using the lexical decision task (LDT) paradigm. In two of these experiments the depth of information processing was also measured by a memory test. The typical result for LDT procedure was not confirmed – the noetic perspective did not cause faster recognition of words related to this perspective. However, the activation of the noetic perspective in the condition of activated attention manifested itself in a better memory of noetic words and in the transfer of positive affect to related noetic objects.
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Some view religious fundamentalism as inclusive of fear of the world as a dangerous place. Fundamentalists are known to have extensive taboo lists, but research concerning their reactions to taboo stimuli is sparse. If fear is a basic component of fundamentalism, then reactions to taboo stimuli should be somewhat similar to common fear reactions, including subjective appraisal of discomfort, psychophysiological arousal, cognitive interference, and behavioral avoidance. The current research addressed some of these questions with three studies to examine subjective discomfort to religiously-taboo and religiously-neutral words and photographs (N = 160), physiological arousal to these same photographs (N = 129), and attentional bias on a modified Stroop test of these same words (N = 182). Although subjective appraisals of discomfort to taboo words and photographs among fundamentalists were confirmed, this research did not find that physiological responses or cognitive interference to taboo stimuli were elevated in those scoring high in religious fundamentalism.
Article
Mechanisms underlying exogenous attention to central and peripheral distracters were temporally and spatially explored while 30 participants performed a digit categorization task. Neural (event-related potentials -ERPs-, analyzed both at the scalp and at the voxel level) and behavioral indices of exogenous attention were analyzed. Distracters were either biologically salient or neutral, in order to test whether the exogenous attention bias to the former observed in previous studies is independent of, or interacts with, distracter eccentricity. Two subcomponents of the N2 component of the ERPs, N2olp and N2ft, reflected processes related to peripheral distracters processing. N2olp effects, located in the dorsal attention network (supplementary motor area), were probably related to covert reorientation to peripheral distracters. N2ft effects, located in the default mode network (posterior cingulate cortex), appeared to reflect less effort in the ongoing task when peripheral distracters were presented. N2ft also showed a biological saliency effect which was independent of eccentricity and was located in the polar/ventral prefrontal cortex. P3 showed greater amplitudes to centrally presented distracters. These latter effects were located in TEO (visual cortex), and would be functionally associated with spatial interference between the target and central distracters. Behavior showed the relevance of both central and peripheral distracters in exogenous attention. These results indicate that exogenous attention to peripheral distracters differed in temporal and spatial terms from exogenous attention to central distracters and that it is biased towards biologically salient events irrespective of their eccentricity.
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The relationship between the evoked heart-rate (HR) reaction to phobic pictures and the attentional bias was investigated in specific phobics. Forty-five specific phobic and 39 control participants were shown phobia-related pictures while HR was being recorded; they were administered the modified dot-probe task, the modified Stroop task, and gave subjective ratings of pictures. Unlike control participants, specific phobics showed HR acceleration to phobia-related pictures, which was significantly correlated with their fear ratings, and a significant Stroop interference effect. There were no group differences with regard to an attentional bias in the dot-probe task but early deceleration of the HR reaction to phobic pictures was related to more pronounced selective attention toward these stimuli in phobics. The results provide partial support for Cook and Turpin's (1997) conjecture of a relationship between the early decelerative orienting component of the HR reaction and the selective attentional bias in phobia.
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Individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) are characterized by excessive concerns about perceived defects or flaws in their appearance, most commonly, facial features. Previous research has shown that BDD sufferers, relative to mentally healthy controls, are characterized by emotion recognition deficits (particularly a bias to misinterpret neutral facial expressions in a negative way). It remains an open question though whether these deficits can be modified through specific training programs. To address this question, we evaluated emotion recognition among individuals with BDD (n = 34), individuals with a dermatological condition (n = 34), and mentally healthy control participants (n = 34) before and after a single-session emotion recognition training program. As expected, BDD participants were overall significantly worse in identifying neutral expressions, relative to the other groups, whereas no difference was obtained between the dermatology and control groups. Further, with respect to neutral and scared expressions, BDD participants improved significantly more in the training condition, relative to the nontraining condition. There is initial evidence that deficits in recognizing neutral and scared expressions can be normalized through a specific training program when evaluated immediately after the training session. It needs to be addressed in future research whether emotion recognition training programs can diminish these deficits on the long term, and how improved emotion recognition might be related to BDD's symptom reduction such as decreased avoidance behaviors in social situations.
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A substantial literature indicates that anxiety is often associated with selec- tive attention to threat cues. Socially anxious individuals are excessively concerned about negative evaluation by others. One might therefore predict that high social anxiety would be associated with selective attention to negative facial expressions. On the other hand, some recent models have suggested that social anxiety may be associated with reduced processing of external social cues. A modi® ed dot-probe task was used to investigate face attention. High and low socially anxious individuals were presented with pairs of pictures, consisting of a face (positive, neutral, or negative) and a household object, under conditions of social-evaluative threat or no threat. The results indicated that, compared to low socially anxious individuals, high socially anxious individuals show an attentional bias away from emotional (positive and negative) faces but this effect is only observed under conditions of social-evaluative threat. Theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed.
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The literature on interference in the Stroop Color–Word Task, covering over 50 years and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set of 18 reliable empirical findings is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories—relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading—are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more successful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention.
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Vietnam combat veterans with (n = 15) and without (n = 15) posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) performed a modified Stroop task in which they named the colors of neutral words (e.g., INPUT), positive words (e.g., LOVE), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) words (e.g., GERMS), and PTSD words (e.g., BODYBAGS). In contrast to normal controls, PTSD patients took significantly longer to color-name PTSD words than to color-name neutral, OCD, and positive words. Because Stroop interference reflects involuntary semantic activation, it may provide a quantitative measure of intrusive cognitive activity--the hallmark symptom of PTSD.
Article
Subjects performed an idiographic, computerised version of the modified Stroop colour-naming task after having undergone a film-induced mood manipulation designed to produce either anxiety, elation, or a neutral mood. The Stroop stimuli were words related either to the subject's positive current concerns (e.g. goals, interests), to the subject's negative current concerns (e.g. personal worries), or to neither. The results indicated that words strongly related to subject's positive as well as to negative current concerns produced significantly more Stroop interference than did words unrelated or weakly related to their current concerns. Although the films strongly influenced the subjects' moods in predicted directions initially, mood changes were largely not maintained throughout the experiment. Thus, it is not surprising that no significant interactions with word type were found. These results indicate that the “emotional Stroop effect” occurs in normal subjects as well as in anxious patients, and occurs with positive as well as with negative material of strong personal relevance.
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This paper deals with questionnaires tapping fears of snakes, spiders, mutilation, and public speaking. Psychometric description of the scales across several samples indicated consistent distribution characteristics. In addition, consistently high reliability estimates were obtained; available results on test-retest reliability and validity were also encouraging. Correlations of these tests with one another and with general measures of anxiety indicated little shared variance. Inclusion of these scales in fear assessment procedures is suggested to promote standardization of evaluation and comparability of results across samples and laboratories.
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Contrasts are statistical procedures for asking focused questions of data. Researchers, teachers of research methods and graduate students will be familiar with the principles and procedures of contrast analysis included here. But they, for the first time, will also be presented with a series of newly developed concepts, measures, and indices that permit a wider and more useful application of contrast analysis. This volume takes on this new approach by introducing a family of correlational effect size estimates. By returning to these correlations throughout the book, the authors demonstrate special adaptations in a variety of contexts from two group comparison to one way analysis of variance contexts, to factorial designs, to repeated measures designs and to the case of multiple contrasts.
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Experimantal psychopathologists have increasingly relied on the concepts methods of cognitive psychology to elucidate information-processing associated with anxiety disorders. However, research has without reference to how these abnormalities are instantiated in brain. The purpose of this article is to provide a survey of points of between the cognitive and neurobiological perspectives with regard disorders.
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The relation between spider fear in children and cognitive processing bias toward threatening information was examined. It was investigated whether spider fear in children is related to a cognitive bias for threatening pictures and words. Pictorial and linguistic Stroop stimuli were administered to 28 spider phobic and 30 control children aged 8–12. Spider-phobic children showed a moderate bias for threatening words. Surprisingly, no bias was found for spider pictures, while the spider-phobic children judged the pictures as more aversive. Moreover, in a recent similar study in adults (Kindt & Brosschot, 1997), a strong relation between spider phobia and bias toward threat words and pictures was found. Several explanations are given to account for this divergence.
Article
Four experiments investigating the detailed nature of the attentional bias in anxiety are reported. Previous research using the Stroop task has shown that, when compared with non-patient controls, anxious patients are relatively slower at colour naming threat-related words than non-threat words. Experiments One and Two investigated whether this apparent attentional bias is a function of anxiety per se and/or is related to patient/non-patient status. Experiment One compared colour-naming times for threat and non-threat words in low, medium and high trait anxiety normal subjects. High anxiety was not associated with slower colour-naming times for threat words. Experiment Two compared generalized anxiety disorder patients with equally anxious non-patients and found that the patients were significantly slower at colour-naming threat words. Read aloud and dwell tasks were also included in these experiments in order to identify the mechanism of Stroop interference. Experiments Three and Four investigated whether anxious patients' attentional bias is specific to threat-related material or also extends to certain positive, emotional material. In Experiment Three words used in previous Stroop studies were rated for emotionality. Threat words were more emotional, as well as more threatening, than control words, indicating that previous studies have confounded threat and emotionality. Experiment Four compared colour-naming times for threat words, equally emotional positive words, and neutral words. Consistent with the emotionality hypothesis, generalized anxiety disorder patients were slower than non-anxious controls at colour naming both threat words and positive words. The theoretical, methodological and clinical implications of these results are discussed.
Article
Attentional biases to threatening stimuli are frequently demonstrated in anxious subjects by means of various linguistic experimental tasks. We argue that, for reasons of both ecological validity and accessibility of affective information, a pictorial task would be a more appropriate test of attentional bias in subjects with spider phobia. Before and after a two-session exposure treatment, 25 subjects with spider phobia were presented with a combined pictoria/linguistic Stroop task. As hypothesized, subjects with spider phobia showed an attentional bias for pictorial and linguistic spider-related stimuli and both attentional biases were strongly reduced after treatment. In contrast to our expectations, pictorial stimuli generally resulted in smaller attentional biases than linguistic stimuli. A post hoc explanation is discussed.
Article
Attentional bias is a central feature of many cognitive theories of psychopathology. One of the most frequent methods of investigating such bias has been an emotional analog of the Stroop task. In this task, participants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words vary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology. The authors review research showing that patients are often slower to name the color of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condition. They address the causes and mechanisms underlying the phenomenon, focusing on J.D. Cohen, K. Dunbar, and J.L. McClelland's (1990) parallel distributed processing model.
Article
Spider phobics were tested before and after one-session treatment for spider phobia, or a comparable waiting period, using a spider-word Stroop test and questionnaires in which they rated spider-relevant threat beliefs. Compared with untreated spider phobic controls, the treated phobics changed significantly in their negative beliefs about spiders after treatment. Controls and treated phobics showed the same change in their reaction time latencies to spider stimuli in the Stroop test. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that the modification of threat beliefs is crucial in changing the response to phobic stimuli. It is concluded that the threat-specific Stroop test is an ambiguous measure of fear-related cognitive processes.
Article
The purpose of this study was to examine whether anxiety-related cognitive bias for threat is stronger for threatening pictures than for threatening words. Spider-phobic participants (n = 31) and control participants (n = 33) performed a pictorial and linguistic spider Stroop task. Spider-phobic participants showed a marked bias for threat. However, this bias was similar for pictures and for words, although the spider-phobic group evaluated the pictures as being more aversive. The results suggest that automatic processing of threatening information in people with phobias is triggered in an on-off fashion, independent of subjective threat of the stimuli. This lack of distinction in automatic processing of weak and strong predictors of danger may be fundamental to the irrational nature of anxiety disorders.
Article
The goal of this study was to clarify whether patients with chronic pain selectively attend to syndrome-specific (i.e., pain-related) information and, if so, to determine whether this occurs at the conscious (i.e., strategic) or unconscious (i.e., automatic) level. This study was conducted at a tertiary care rehabilitation center. Thirty-three patients with chronic back and/or neck pain and 33 healthy volunteers matched for age, sex, and education participated in this study. A computerized version of a modified Stroop color-naming task, with unmasked and masked conditions, was used to assess strategic and automatic information processing of words related to sensory pain, affect pain, physical threat, social threat, and neutral themes. A repeated-measures ANOVA indicated that patients with chronic pain but not healthy volunteers had delayed color-naming latencies to both sensory and affect pain words in the unmasked condition. Color-naming latency differences were not evident for other word types in the unmasked condition or for any word types in the masked condition. Correlational and regression analyses indicated that the delayed color-naming latencies to pain words in the unmasked condition observed for the chronic pain patients were, in part, associated with high pain-specific cognitive anxiety and interference and lower levels of anxiety sensitivity. Individuals with chronic pain selectively process pain-related cues at the strategic level but not at the automatic level. Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed.
Contrasts and effect sizes in behavioral research: A correlational approach Automatic and strategic processing of threat cues in patients with chronic pain: A modified Stroop evaluation
  • R Rosenthal
  • R L Rosnow
  • D B Rubin
Rosenthal, R., Rosnow, R. L., & Rubin, D. B. (2000). Contrasts and effect sizes in behavioral research: A correlational approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Snider, B. S., Asmundson, G. J. G., & Wiese, K. C. (2000). Automatic and strategic processing of threat cues in patients with chronic pain: A modified Stroop evaluation. Clinical Journal of Pain, 16, 144–154.