Cognition and Emotion
Laboratory
Department of
Psychology
The University of
Western Australia
Back to Contents PhD Projects Honours ARC Funded
Online Attentional Retraining for High Trait Anxious Individuals
Attentional bias towards threat is argued to be a central cognitive feature of high trait anxious individuals and is thought to causally contribute to the development of anxiety vulnerability (MacLeod, 1991, 1996). To this end researchers have sought to develop tasks that not only measure this attentional bias but also serve to modify it. Recent research has demonstrated that differential attentional bias can be temporarily induced in participants who previously have not shown a bias, and after presentation of a stressor these participants then display differential anxious responses. This demonstrates the causal link between attentional response to threat information and vulnerability to anxiety (MacLeod, Rutherford, Campbell, Ebsworthy, & Holker, 2002). Preliminary research (Mathews & MacLeod, 2002) has indicated that individuals showing a pre-existing attentional bias to threat can be retrained, so that the bias is attenuated and anxiety vulnerability is correspondingly reduced. The goal of this proposed research program is to develop and refine a set of training parameters that will maximize the efficiency of this retraining, and to appraise its capacity to reduce anxious symptomatology using two distinct anxious populations, those with pervasive and chronic general anxiety problems and those who show acute anxiety responses to a specific situation.
Attentional and Interpretive Biases: Do Common or Dissociable Mechanisms Underpin Anxiety Vulnerability?
Anxiety vulnerability is characterised by biased patterns of selective information processing that operate to favour the encoding of threatening information. Both attentional and interpretive biases have consistently been shown to causally mediate anxiety vulnerability, but the relationship between attentional and interpretive biases is relatively unknown. Two alternative hypotheses regarding the relationship of these cognitive biases in anxiety can be distinguished. The Common Mechanism account proposes that these two biases are simultaneous expressions of a single underlying biased mechanism that mediates anxiety vulnerability. In contrast the Dissociable Mechanisms account suggests that attentional and interpretive biases are quite discrete cognitive anomalies that represent independent pathways to anxiety vulnerability. The proposed research aims to test the differential predictions based on these accounts through a series of experiments that will examine the effect of bias manipulation on subsequent assessment of these biases. The use of assessment tasks proven to measure anxiety-linked attentional and interpretive biases, and training procedures that have been proven to modify anxiety vulnerability, will overcome problems associated with previous work in this field.
2003-2006
(proposal
currently under review)
Project Title: Attentional and
interpretive bias in anxiety: Concurrent expressions of a common selective
processing mechanism, or independent mediators of anxiety vulnerability?
We have shown that attentional biases and interpretive biases causally influence anxiety vulnerability. Our success in developing innovative methodologies for directly manipulating each pattern of processing selectivity, leaves us poised to initiate several important lines of further enquiry:
- Do attentional and interpretive biases arise as concurrent manifestations of a common underlying causal mechanism, or instead represent alternative causal pathways in the mediation of anxiety vulnerability?
- What are the mechanisms through which our different training procedures serve to modify such patterns of processing selectivity?
- How does each class of bias interact with the informational content of stressful events to moderate the intensity of emotional reactions? It may be that individuals who report high levels of trait anxiety are disproportionately vulnerable to becoming state anxious in response to those stressful situations likely to demand the engagement of their biased processing. If so then the tailoring of training procedures to selectively target the principal class of processing bias displayed by a given high trait anxious individual may increase the degree to which such training serves to reduce anxiety vulnerability.
Resolution of these issues will significantly advance our theoretical understanding of the mechanisms that govern individual differences in anxiety vulnerability, and is likely to have a direct impact upon the development of cognitive procedures designed to therapeutically modify such vulnerability.