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Mechanisms of visual threat detection in specific phobia
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Mechanisms of visual threat detection in specific phobia

Mariann R Weierich and Teresa A Treat
Cognition and emotion, Vol.29(6), pp.992-1006
08/18/2015
DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2014.960369
PMCID: PMC4372506
PMID: 25251896
url
https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2014.960369View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

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.
 Anxiety Attention Attentional blink Sensitivity Threat

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