Information Processing Biases and Anxiety || Selective Attention to Threat in Childhood Anxiety: Evidence from Visual Probe Paradigms

✍ Scribed by Hadwin, Julie A.; Field, Andy P.

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 802 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 0470998199
• DOI: 10.1002/9780470661468.ch4

✦ Synopsis

The efficiency of the attention system mediates individual differences in intelligence and emotional processing ). An attentional system that preferentially filters and selects negative, threatening, anxiogenic information is more likely to potentiate perceptions of threat and danger; activate a range of dysfunctional thoughts, feelings and beliefs about the present and future; and, ultimately, increase an individual's vulnerability to anxiety. Furthermore, the frequent capturing of attention by threat-related stimuli is likely to frustrate ongoing goal-directed behaviour .

In recent years, there has been considerable research into attentional processes thought to characterize anxiety. Much of this has focused on developing a range of experimental paradigms that clarify biases in specific components/aspects of attention, that is, preferential selection of certain stimuli (over others) due to combinations of low-level perceptual, semantic, motivational or higher level (task relevant) attributes that render some stimuli more salient than others. This chapter discusses recent conceptual advances in our understanding of attention and its component processes, with specific reference to the application of visual probe tasks (and variants) to examine biases in selective attention in anxious children and adolescents.