Task relevance of emotional information affects anxiety-linked attention bias in visual search

Dodd, H. F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1446-5338, Vogt, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3178-2805, Turkileri, N. and Notebaert, L. (2017) Task relevance of emotional information affects anxiety-linked attention bias in visual search. Biological Psychology, 122. pp. 13-20. ISSN 0301-0511 doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.01.017

Abstract/Summary

Task relevance affects emotional attention in healthy individuals. Here, we investigate whether the association between anxiety and attention bias is affected by the task relevance of emotion during an attention task. Participants completed two visual search tasks. In the emotion-irrelevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of neutral, middle-aged faces was old or young. Irrelevant to the task, target faces displayed angry, happy, or neutral expressions. In the emotion-relevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of middle-aged neutral faces was happy or angry (target faces also varied in age). Trait anxiety was not associated with attention in the emotion-relevant task. However, in the emotion-irrelevant task, trait anxiety was associated with a bias for angry over happy faces. These findings demonstrate that the task relevance of emotional information affects conclusions about the presence of an anxiety-linked attention bias.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/55068
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.01.017
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Anxiety and Depression in Young People (AnDY)
Publisher	Elsevier
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