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Specific Phobias |
Overcoming Anxiety (Home) > Specific Phobias > Attentional Bias Attentional BiasAttentional bias refers to hyperattention to threatening material. This hyperattention occurs even with verbal material that is not relevant to the primary task in which the subject is involved. One frequently employed technique for demonstrating attentional bias is the modified Stroop colour task. During this task, subjects are confronted with rows of words that are printed in different colours (e.g., red, green, yellow, and blue). Subjects are required to name the colour of a word while ignoring the meaning of that word. A consistent finding in Stroop studies with anxious patients is that their colour naming of threatening words is slower than that of neutral words For example, spider phobics display retarded colour-naming times when they are confronted with spider-related words (e.g., ‘‘spider’’, ‘‘creepy’’), but not when they have to colour name neutral words (e.g.,‘‘car’’). This is due to the fact that spider phobics automatically direct their attention to the content of the threatening words and this interferes with their main task (i.e., colour naming). As to the clinical consequence of attentional bias, it seems likely that an increased focus on danger and threat stimuli may serve to maintain phobic fear. That is, attentional bias implicates an increased encoding of threatening material and this, in turn, will elevate fear levels. Interestingly, clinical improvement of specific phobias due to exposure therapy is accompanied by a disappearance or reduction of attentional bias on the Stroop task. The relevance of findings such as these is twofold. To begin with, they suggest that the modified Stroop colour task and related cognitive tasks are potentially useful clinical assessment tools for measuring symptom severity and treatment prognosis. Note that performance on these cognitive tasks is quite different from completing a self-report questionnaire. That is, unlike questionnaires, these tasks do not require introspection or conscious monitoring. Rather, they directly tap cognitive processes that are involuntary and automatic. Germane to this issue are studies that succeeded in documenting attentional bias phenomena for subliminally presented threat words. In these studies, normal subjects high or low on trait anxiety saw ultra short (e.g., 30 msec) presentations of neutral and threat words that were immediately followed by supraliminal coloured masks. Subjects were asked to identify the colour of the masks. Although subjects were not able consciously to identify the neutral or threat words, high-trait anxious, but not low-trait anxious participants displayed retarded colour naming (i.e., attentional bias) after threatening, but not after neutral target words. With this procedure. A second point is that experimental tools such as the modified Stroop task offer good opportunities for studying the way in which fundamental traits interact with stressful events to maintain psychopathology. Attentional bias phenomena have been found to occur in a number of anxiety disorders (e.g., specific phobia, panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder), but, as was pointed out above, also in high-trait anxious individuals. Trait anxiety is closely related to higher-order traits like neuroticism and behavioural inhibition. Thus, it appears that these traits point in the direction of a hypervigilant cognitive style that gives high processing priorities to threat-related stimuli, thereby promoting escalation of fear. In the words of MacLeod : ‘‘high trait anxious individuals are those people who, at an automatic non-conscious level of processing, respond to elevations in state anxiety or arousal by increasing the degree to which generally threatening information selectively is encoded from the environment’’.
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