Biased attention to threat represents a key feature of anxiety disorders. This bias
is altered by therapeutic or stressful experiences, suggesting that the bias is plastic.
Charting on-line behavioral and neurophysiological changes in attention bias may generate
insights on the nature of such plasticity. We used an attention-orientation task with
threat cues to examine how healthy individuals alter their response over time to such
cues. In Experiments 1 through 3, we established that healthy individuals demonstrate
an increased attention bias away from threat over time. For Experiment 3, we used
functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine the neural bases for this phenomenon.
Gradually increasing attention bias away from threat is associated with increased
activation in the occipitotemporal cortex. Examination of plasticity of attention
bias with individuals at risk for anxiety disorders may reveal how threatening stimuli
come to be categorized differently in this population over time.
Key words
To read this article in full you will need to make a payment
Purchase one-time access:
Academic & Personal: 24 hour online accessCorporate R&D Professionals: 24 hour online accessOne-time access price info
- For academic or personal research use, select 'Academic and Personal'
- For corporate R&D use, select 'Corporate R&D Professionals'
Subscribe:
Subscribe to Biological PsychiatryAlready a print subscriber? Claim online access
Already an online subscriber? Sign in
Register: Create an account
Institutional Access: Sign in to ScienceDirect
References
- Attentional bias for emotional faces in generalized anxiety disorder.Br J Clin Psychol. 1999; 38: 267-278
- Neuroplasticity.Nature. 2004; 427: 311-312
- Sensitivity to feared stimuli in obsessive-compulsives.Cognit Ther Res. 1986; 10: 477-486
- Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety?.J Exp Psychol Gen. 2001; 130: 681-700
- Posttraumatic stress disorder following assault.J Consult Clin Psychol. 2003; 71: 419-431
- Neuroimaging evidence for dissociable forms of repetition priming.Science. 2000; 287: 1269-1272
- Lesions of the amygdala, but not of the cerebellum or red nucleus, block conditioned fear as measured with the potentiated startle paradigm.Behav Neurosci. 1986; 100: 11-22
- Schedule for affective disorders and schizophrenia for school-age children—present lifetime version (K-SADS-PL).J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 1997; 36
- The Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces. 1998 ([Pictorial face set available from Department of Neurosciences, Karolinska Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden].)
- Attentional bias in emotional disorders.J Abnorm Psychol. 1986; 95: 15-20
- Selective attention and emotional vulnerability.J Abnorm Psychol. 2002; 111: 107-123
- Effect of psychological treatment on cognitive bias in generalized anxiety disorder.Behav Res Ther. 1995; 33: 293-303
- Selective orienting of attention to masked threat faces in social anxiety.Behav Res Ther. 2002; 40: 1403-1414
- Adolescent immaturity in attention-related brain engagement to emotional facial expressions.Neuroimage. 2003; 20: 420-428
- Increased prefrontal and parietal activity after training of working memory.Nat Neurosci. 2004; 7: 75-79
- Neural processing of emotional faces requires attention.Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002; 99: 11458-11463
- Developmental psychobiology and response to threats.Biol Psychiatry. 2003; 53: 796-808
- Attention and the detection of signals.J Exp Psychol. 1980; 109: 160-174
- The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (SCID). I: History, rationale, and description.Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1992; 49: 624-629
- Pharmacological modulation of behavioral and neuronal correlates of repetition priming.J Neurosci. 2001; 21: 6846-6852
- Wechsler abbreviated scale intelligence. The Psychological Corporation, San Antonio, TX1999
- An example of using mixed models and PROC MIXED for longitudinal data.J Biopharm Stat. 1997; 7: 481-500
- A unified statistical approach for determining significant signals in images of cerebral activation.Hum Brain Mapp. 1996; 4: 58-73
Article info
Publication history
Published online: September 21, 2004
Accepted:
July 21,
2004
Received in revised form:
June 17,
2004
Received:
March 2,
2004
Identification
Copyright
© 2004 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
