Mechanisms of visual threat detection in specific phobia.
Cogn Emot
; 29(6): 992-1006, 2015.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-25251896
ABSTRACT
People with anxiety or stress-related disorders attend differently to threat-relevant compared with non-threat stimuli, yet the temporal mechanisms of differential allocation of attention are not well understood. We investigated two independent mechanisms of temporal processing of visual threat by comparing spider-phobic and non-fearful participants using a rapid serial visual presentation task. Consistent with prior literature, spider phobics, but not non-fearful controls, displayed threat-specific facilitated detection of spider stimuli relative to negative stimuli and neutral stimuli. Further, signal detection analyses revealed that facilitated threat detection in spider-phobic participants was driven by greater sensitivity to threat stimulus features and a trend towards a lower threshold for detecting spider stimuli. However, phobic participants did not display reliably slowed temporal disengagement from threat-relevant stimuli. These findings advance our understanding of threat feature processing that might contribute to the onset and maintenance of symptoms in specific phobia and disorders that involve visual threat information more generally.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Trastornos Fóbicos
/
Percepción Visual
/
Miedo
Tipo de estudio:
Diagnostic_studies
/
Observational_studies
Límite:
Adolescent
/
Adult
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Cogn Emot
Año:
2015
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Estados Unidos