Social Anxiety: Understanding the Attentional Bias to Threat

Biased attention toward threatening facial expressions is an important maintaining and possibly aetiological factor for social anxiety. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms. To develop our understanding of this threat bias, the relative contributions of top-down attention, bottom-up attention, and selection history were differentiated across four studies. In Study One, the roles of top-down attention, bottom-up attention, and selection history were tested in an unselected sample using a modification of the dot-probe task, in which participants were cued to attend to a happy or angry face on each trial. Results showed that attentional orienting toward facial expressions was not exclusively driven by bottom-up attentional capture as some previous theories suggest; but instead, participants could shift attention toward emotional faces in a top-down manner. This effect was eliminated when the faces were inverted, demonstrating that top-down attention relies on holistic face processing. Study One found no evidence of selection history (i.e., no improvement on repeated trials or blocks of trials in which the task was to orient to the same expression). Study Two tested whether this ability to use top-down attention to orient to emotional faces is impaired for individuals with social anxiety. Using the same task as Study One, Study Two found that participants with higher levels of social anxiety were selectively impaired in attentional shifting toward a cued happy face when it was paired with an angry face, but not when paired with a neutral face. These results indicate that high social anxiety is associated with deficits in top-down control of attention, which are selectively revealed in the presence of non-task-relevant threat. The results of Study Two could be explained by bottom-up attention to threat or a top-down set for threat that could not be overcome by the instruction to attend to a happy face. To test this, Study Three utilised a modified dot-probe task in which participants were presented with an upright face paired with an inverted face (displaying a disgust or neutral expression) and engagement with and disengagement of attention from threatening faces were measured separately. The task was performed under no, low, and high working-memory load conditions. Since working-memory load draws on the same resources as top-down attention, interference from increasing working-memory load on attentional orienting would point to a role for top-down attention. Social anxiety was not associated with delayed disengagement from threat. However, surprisingly, high social anxiety was associated with an engagement bias away from threat, while low social anxiety was associated with a bias toward threat. These results were unaffected by the working-memory load manipulation. However, some methodological issues were identified with the study. Study Four overcame these methodological issues by using a paired angry and neutral face under no, low and high working-memory load conditions. Higher levels of social anxiety were associated with increased engagement with threat under no-load, but not under low- and high-load conditions. Thus, this body of research provides evidence that social anxiety is associated with an engagement bias to threat, which is driven by top-down attention

Attentional threat biases and their role in anxiety: A neurophysiological perspective

One of the most important function of selective attention is the efficient and accurate detection and identification of cues associated with threat. However, in pathological anxiety, this attentional mechanism seems to be dysfunctional, which leads to an exaggeration of threat processing and significant functional impairment. This attentional threat bias (ATB) has been proposed as a key mechanism in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Recently, evidence has accumulated that the behavioral assessment of ATB by means of reaction times is compromised by conceptual and methodological problems. In this review paper we argue that a brain-based assessment of ATB, which includes different mechanistic aspects of biased attention, may provide neuromechanistic knowledge regarding the etiology and maintenance of anxiety, and potentially start identifying different targets for effective treatment. We summarize examples for such an approach, highlighting the strengths of electrophysiological measurements, which include the sensitivity to time dynamics, specificity to specific neurocomputational mechanisms, and the continuous/dimensional nature of the resulting variables. These desirable properties are a prerequisite for developing trans-diagnostic biomarkers of attentional bias, and hence may inform individually tailored treatment approaches

Cortical correlates of the processing of feared and fear-relevant stimuli: evidence from event-related potential studies comparing phobic and non-phobic subjects

Diese Arbeit untersucht die elektrokortikalen Korrelate der Verarbeitung gefürchteter und furcht-relevanter Reize bei Spinnenphobikern und nicht-spinnenängstlichen Personen. Die Einleitung gibt einen Überblick zum aktuellen Stand der Forschung zu Phobien und kognitiven Verarbeitungsanomalien bei Phobikern und stellt die Befunde bisheriger psychophysiologischer Studien zu den neuronalen Korrelaten der Verarbeitung gefürchteter bzw. hoch emotionaler Reize dar. Die Experimente I und II untersuchen die emotionale Interferenz bei Spinnenphobikern mittels eines emotionalen Stroop-Paradigmas, wobei in Experiment I eingefärbte Spinnen-, Vögel- und Blumenbilder verwendet wurden und in Experiment II farbige schematische Spinnen- und Blumenbilder. Experiment III untersucht, ab wann eine Spinne von Spinnenphobikern und nicht-phobischen Probanden als Spinne wahrgenommen wird. Hierfür wurde speziell eine Serie von Bildern konstruiert, in denen eine schematische Spinne sich langsam in eine Blume verwandelt und umgekehrt. Es wurden sowohl Verhaltensmaße wie Reaktionszeiten und Klassifikationshäufigkeiten als auch hirnelektrische Parameter untersucht. Die Ergebnisse weisen auf einen Interpretationsbias oder eine Art Reizgeneralisation bei Spinnenphobikern hin

The Impact of Emotional Sounds on Arousal and Task Performance

In times of emotional arousal, it is hypothesized that neural processes are triggered to “heighten” our senses to better respond to threatening stimuli. Some studies have tested this by exposing participants to emotional sounds to determine their impacts on visual acuity but have found mixed results. Previous studies have not investigated interactions between arousal induced by emotional sounds and visual acuity. Participants (N = 42) performed an orientation detection task while presented in silence or with sounds that varied in valence. Results displayed comparable accuracy across conditions but significantly faster response times during the presentation of negative sounds on the opposite side of the Gabor patch compared to neutral sounds irrespective of spatial location. Additionally, pupil size was significantly greater in the negative condition than in the neutral condition. These findings delineate how changes in arousal due to environmental factors can lead to changes in human performance

The missing link in early emotional processing

Initial evaluation structures (IESs) currently proposed as the earliest detectors of affective stimuli (e.g., amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, or insula) are high-order structures (a) whose response latency cannot account for the first visual cortex emotion-related response (~80 ms), and (b) lack the necessary infrastructure to locally analyze the visual features that define emotional stimuli. Several thalamic structures accomplish both criteria. The lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), a first-order thalamic nucleus that actively processes visual information, with the complement of the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) are proposed as core IESs. This LGN–TRN tandem could be supported by the pulvinar, a second-order thalamic structure, and by other extrathalamic nuclei. The visual thalamus, scarcely explored in affective neurosciences, seems crucial in early emotional evaluation.This research was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN) (Grant no. PGC2018-093570- B-I00) and the Comunidad de Madrid (Grant no. HUM19-HUM5705)

An investigation into the emotion-cognition interaction and sub-clinical anxiety

This thesis combines behavioural and electrophysiological approaches in the study of the emotion-cognition interaction and sub-clinical anxiety. The research questions addressed in this thesis concern, specifically: the impact of emotion on attention; the interplay between attention and emotion in anxiety;and the cognitive construct of affect. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to emotion research, cognitive models of anxiety and motivates the thesis. Chapter 2 investigates whether affective processing is automatic. More specifically, to elucidate whether facilitated processing of threat in anxiety, evidenced by emotion-related ERP modulations, requires attentional resources. It was previously reported that emotional expression effects on ERP waveforms were completely eliminated when attention was directed away from emotional faces to other task-relevant locations (Eimer et al., 2003). However, Bishop et al. (2004) reported that threat-related stimuli can evoke amygdala activity without attentional engagement or conscious awareness in high-anxious but not low-anxious participants. Spatial attention was manipulated using a similar paradigm as Vuilleumier et al. (2001) and Holmes et al. (2003), to investigate the mechanism underlying the threat-related processing bias in anxiety by examining the influence of spatial attention and trait anxiety levels on established ERP modulations by emotional stimuli. Participants were instructed to match two peripheral faces or two peripheral Landolt squares. The Landolt squares task was selected since this is an attentionally demanding task and would likely consume most, if not all, attention resources. The ERP data did not offer support to the claim that affective stimuli are processed during unattended conditions in high-anxious but not low-anxious participants. Rather, it questions whether a preattentive processing bias for emotional faces is specific to heightened anxiety. This is based on the finding of an enhanced LPP response for threat/happy versus neutral faces and an enhanced slow wave for threat versus neutral faces, neither modulated by the focus of attention for both high and low anxiety groups. Chapter 3 investigated the delayed disengagement hypothesis proposed by Fox and colleagues (2001) as the mechanism underlying the threat-related attentional bias in anxiety. This was done by measuring N2pc and LRP latencies while participants performed an adapted version of the spatial cueing task.Stimuli consisted of a central affective image (either a face or IAPS picture, depending on condition) flanked to the left and right by a letter/number pair. Participants had to direct their attention to the left or right of a central affective image to make an orientation judgement of the letter stimulus. It was hypothesised that if threat-related stimuli are able to prolong attentional processing, N2pc onset should be delayed relative to the neutral condition. However, N2pc latency was not modulated by emotional valence of the central image, for either high or low anxiety groups. Thus, this finding does not provide support for the locus of the threat-related bias to the disengage component of attention. Chapter 4 further investigated the pattern of attentional deployment in the threat-related bias in anxiety. This was done by measuring task-switching ability between neutral and emotional tasks using an adapted version of Johnson’s (in press) attentional control capacity for emotional representations (ACCE) task. Participants performed either an emotional judgement or a neutral judgement task on a compound stimulus that consisted of an affective image (either happy versus fearful faces in the faces condition, or positive versus negative IAPS pictures in the IAPS condition) with a word located centrally across the image (real word versus pseudo-word). Participants scoring higher in trait anxiety were faster to switch from a neutral to a threatening mental set. This improved ability to switch attention to the emotional judgement task when threatening faces are presented is in accordance with a hypervigilance theory of anxiety. However, this processing bias for threat in anxiety was only apparent for emotional faces and not affective scenes, despite the fact that pictures depicting aversive threat scenes were used (e.g., violence, mutilation). This is discussed in more detail with respect to the social significance of salient stimuli. Chapter 5 in a pair of experiments sought to investigate how affect is mentally represented and specifically questions whether affect is represented on the basis of a conceptual metaphor linking direction and affect. The data suggest that the vertical position metaphor underlies our understanding of the relatively abstract concept of affect and is implicitly active, where positive equates with ‘upwards’ and negative with ‘downwards’. Metaphor-compatible directional movements were demonstrated to facilitate response latencies, such that participants were relatively faster to make upward responses to positively-evaluated words and downward responses to negatively-evaluated words than to metaphorincompatible stimulus-response mappings. The finding suggests that popular use of linguistic metaphors depicting spatial representation of affect may reflect our underlying cognitive construct of the abstract concept of valence. Chapter 6 summarises the research in the thesis and implications of the present results are discussed, in particular in relation to cognitive models of anxiety. Areas of possible future research are provided

The role of information format in financial decision-making : bridging psychology, neuroscience and accounting research

Mestrado em Ciências EmpresariaisA ideia de que a avaliação e as decisões financeiras dependem não só do valor real das empresas espelhada na informação contida nos relatos financeiros, mas também da forma como a mesma é apresentada tem vindo a ser empiricamente demonstrada. Contudo, sabemos ainda muito pouco sobre os mecanismos subjacentes ao impacto que o formato tem nos processos de tomada de decisão. Para compreender melhor o impacto da forma como a informação é apresentada e disponibilizada e para conseguir criar relatos financeiros mais eficientes ao nível da transmissão da informação desejada, é fundamental perceber os fatores que influenciam a aquisição, o processamento e utilização da informação financeira e contabilística. O conhecimento dos processos psicológicos e neurais que culminam na tomada de decisões e dos fatores que os influenciam requer a integração de abordagens e ferramentas de várias disciplinas e áreas do conhecimento, designadamente da economia, da psicologia, das ciências computacionais e da neurociência. O objetivo deste trabalho é rever e discutir a investigação mais recente nestes diferentes campos, em particular a relacionada com a importância da forma de apresentação da informação. Pretende-se ainda discutir a abordagem multidisciplinar que começa a emergir sob a designação de "neuroacounting", reconhecendo o seu potencial, mas também as suas limitações.The idea that not only what but also how financial accounting information is disclosed may impact financial evaluation and trading decisions has gained growing empirical support. Yet, despite its profound implications for accounting researchers and information users as well as policy regulators, we know little about the variables mediating these effects. Crucial for both understanding these effects and efficiently designing financial reports is to understand the factors that influence the sampling, processing and use of financial information. Only then we will be able to shape policy and tailor organizational processes to promote efficient use of financial information. A rich and biologically rooted understanding of how people make decisions and the factors that shape it will require integration of insights and tools from multiple disciplines including economics, psychology, computer science and neuroscience. The aim of this paper is to review and bridge research from these different fields to address the importance of presentation variables in financial decision-making. More generally, the paper reviews and discusses the emerging field of ‘neuroaccounting’ and the potential as well as the challenges of this multidisciplinary approach to tackle behavioural accounting questions

Selective attention to threat versus reward: meta-analysis and neural-network modeling of the dot-probe task.

Two decades of research conducted to date has examined selective visual attention to threat and reward stimuli as a function of individual differences in anxiety using the dot-probe task. The present study tests a connectionist neural-network model of meta-analytic and key individual-study results derived from this literature. Attentional bias for threatening and reward-related stimuli is accounted for by connectionist model implementation of the following clinical psychology and affective neuroscience principles: 1) affective learning and temperament, 2) state and trait anxiety, 3) intensity appraisal, 4) affective chronometry, 5) attentional control, and 6) selective attention training. Theoretical implications for the study of mood and anxiety disorders are discussed