The DOI matches its Crossref record; 29 of the 29 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Anxiety and Attention to Threatening Pictures
Abstract
Previous research using attentional search tasks has revealed an anxiety-related bias favouring attention to threatening words when they are presented simultaneously with emotionally neutral words. In Experiment 1, using a similar task, a related effect was found here with emotionally threatening pictures. When pictures were used as location cues in a second experiment, high-trait anxious individuals were slower than less anxious controls when responding to targets requiring attentional disengagement from threat, and they were slower in general with pictures judged to be highly threatening. In a third experiment using the same task but with a longer cue exposure, a related disengagement difficulty occurred across both groups, although the more general slowing with severe threat was again confined to the anxious group. We conclude that attentional bias involves both a specific difficulty in disengaging attention from the location of any threat and a more general interference effect that is related to threat level.
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“Individuals with high trait anxiety and patients with a range of clinical anxiety disorders have been shown to have threat-related biases in selective attention.”
From Short-term serotonergic but not noradrenergic antidepressant administration reduces attentional vigilance to threat in healthy volunteers (2009) · cites this paper as Yiend and Mathews, 2001
In the citing paper
“Anxious individuals are exquisitely sensitive to distraction by mildly threatening stimuli (1–3).”
From Lateral prefrontal cortex mediates the cognitive modification of attentional bias (2010) · cites this paper as [3]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Yiend, J., & Mathews, A.
- Affiliations
- MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (GB)
- ORCID
- Yiend, Jenny
- Venue
- The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2001-08
- Volume
- 54
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 665-681
- ISSN
- 0272-4987 (ISSN-L)
- 1464-0740
- OpenAlex
- W2009009668
- Cited by
- 472
- References
- 26
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 21 · 2016: 17 · 2015: 21 · 2014: 27 · 2013: 29 · 2012: 34
- FWCI
- 12.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Research Portal (King's College London) (submittedVersion)
- 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
- anxiety, attentional bias, threat detection, attentional disengagement, trait anxiety, threat level, interference effects, location cues
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Anxiety, Attention, Cues, Fear, Humans, Photic Stimulation, Surveys and Questionnaires, Random Allocation, Severity of Illness Index, Social Desirability
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