Eye movements and behavioral responses to threatening and nonthreatening stimuli during visual search in phobic and nonphobic subjects
Abstract
Spider-phobic and nonphobic subjects searched for a feared/fear-relevant (spider) or neutral target (mushroom) presented in visual matrices of neutral objects (flowers). In half of the displays, the mushroom target was paired with a spider distractor, or a spider target was paired with a mushroom distractor. Although all subjects responded faster to the neutral target than to the feared/fear-relevant target, phobics were slower to respond than nonphobics when a mushroom target was presented with a spider distractor. Their eyes appeared to be drawn to the feared distractor before fixating neutral targets. A further experiment indicated no group differences when subjects merely judged the homogeneity of matrices. Thus, threat seems to capture the attention of phobics only when it is part of a background that subjects are explicitly instructed to ignore.
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The within-groups effects alone were not interpretable, as the search conditions without threatening stimuli were not always matched for difficulty with the conditions containing distractors.
“The within-groups effects alone were not interpretable, as the search conditions without threatening stimuli were not always matched for difficulty with the conditions containing distractors (e.g., Miltner et al., 2004).”
From Eye tracking of attention in the affective disorders: a meta-analytic review and synthesis (2012) · cites this paper as Miltner et al., 2004
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- Authors
- Miltner, W. H. R., Krieschel, S., Hecht, H., Trippe, R., & Weiss, T.
- Affiliations
- Friedrich Schiller University Jena (DE)
- Venue
- Emotion
- Published
- 2004
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 323-339
- ISSN
- 1528-3542 (ISSN-L)
- 1931-1516
- OpenAlex
- W2082512639
- Cited by
- 121
- References
- 40
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 8 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 12
- FWCI
- 8.77
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Emotion (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Keywords
- spider phobia, visual search, eye movements, threat detection, attentional capture, distractor processing, fear-relevant stimuli
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Eye Movements, Fear, Female, Humans, Male, Phobic Disorders, Visual Perception, Case-Control Studies
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