CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 47Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive ProcessesNeural and Behavioral Psychology StudiesVisual Attention and Saliency Detection

Attention bias towards negative emotional information and its relationship with daily worry in the context of acute stress: An eye-tracking study

Open access
Macatee, Richard J., Albanese, Brian J., Schmidt, Norman B., Cougle, Jesse R.·2017·Behaviour Research and Therapy
DOI 10.1016/j.brat.2016.12.013PMC PMC5346289
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Cognitive theories of anxiety psychopathology cite biased attention towards threat as a central vulnerability and maintaining factor. However, many studies have found threat bias indices to have poor reliability and have failed to observe the theorized relationship between threat bias and anxiety symptoms; this may be due to the non-unitary nature of threat bias and the influence of state-level variables on its expression. Accumulating data suggests that state anxious mood is important for the robust expression of threat bias and for relations to emerge between threat bias and symptoms, though this possibility has not been experimentally tested. Eye-tracking was used to assess multiple forms of threat bias (i.e., early vigilance, sustained attention, facilitated engagement, delayed disengagement) thought to be related to anxiety. A non-clinical sample (N = 165) was recruited to test the hypothesis that biased attention towards threat, but not dysphoric or positive emotional stimuli, during an anxious mood induction, but not at a pre-stress baseline, would prospectively predict greater worry symptoms on days in which more naturalistic stressors occurred. Results revealed the hypothesized moderation effect for sustained attention towards threat after the mood induction but not at baseline, though sustained attention towards dysphoric stimuli also moderated the effect of stressors on worry. Worry-relevant sustained attention towards negative emotional stimuli may be a partially mood-context dependent phenomenon.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.brat.2016.12.013

Cites

89 of 89 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Converging evidence indicates that negative emotional content is prioritized over neutral content even during early stages of visual attention.

    “Converging evidence indicates that negative emotional content is prioritized over neutral content even during early stages of visual attention [122-124].”

    From Impact of Media-Induced Uncertainty on Mental Health: Narrative-Based Perspective. (2025) · cites this paper as [123]

    The Introduction defines threat-related attention bias as selective attention to threatening rather than neutral stimuli, and the Methods measure early vigilance by which face receives the first fixation. But the Introduction says evidence for early facilitated engagement is inconsistent, and the Results report no significant change in early vigilance after stress. The paper therefore supports the threat-versus-neutral aspect, not the broad claim that negative content is prioritized even at early stages. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 90 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Ramshur JT 2010 Design, evaluation, and application of heart rate variability software (HRVAS) Doctoral dissertation, Master’s thesis The University of Memphis Memphis, TN Master’s thesis

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Macatee, R. J., Albanese, B. J., Schmidt, N. B., & Cougle, J. R.
Affiliations
Florida State University (US)
Corresponding author
Cougle, Jesse R.
ORCID
Venue
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2017-03
Volume
90
Pages
96-110
ISSN
0005-7967 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.brat.2016.12.013
PMC
PMC5346289
OpenAlex
W2567499020
Cited by
47
References
90
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 3
FWCI
5.20
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
Locations
  • Behaviour Research and Therapy (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
Funders
  • National Institute of Mental Health (T32MH093311)
  • National Institute on Drug Abuse (F31DA039644)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
Keywords
threat bias, attentional bias, acute stress, state anxiety, sustained attention, disengagement, anxiety vulnerability
MeSH terms
Attentional Bias, Affect, Anxiety, Emotions, Eye Movements, Fear, Female, Heart Rate, Humans, Male, Photic Stimulation, Speech, Stress, Psychological, Young Adult

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review