the impact of worry on attention to threat担心对注意力的影响的威胁.pdfVIP

The Impact of Worry on Attention to Threat 1,2 3 4 2 Desmond J. Oathes *, Christian M. Squillante , William J. Ray , Jack B. Nitschke 1 Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America, 2 Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America, 3 University of Pennsylvania Health System, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, 4 Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America Abstract Prior research has often linked anxiety to attentional vigilance for threat using the dot probe task, which presents probes in spatial locations that were or were not preceded by a putative threat stimulus. The present study investigated the impact of worry on threat vigilance by administering this task during a worry condition and during a mental arithmetic control condition to 56 undergraduate students scoring in the low normal range on a measure of chronic worry. The worry induction was associated with faster responses than arithmetic to probes in the attended location following threat words, indicating the combined influence of worry and threat in facilitating attention. Within the worry condition, responses to probes in the attended location were faster for trials containing threat words than for trials with only neutral words, whereas the converse pattern was observed for responses to probes in the unattended location. This connection between worry states and attentional capture by threat may be central to understanding the