title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Jena, Germany. miltner@biopsy.uni-Jena.de
authors.forename: Wolfgang H R
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: Miltner
authors.forename: Silke
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Krieschel
authors.forename: Holger
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hecht
authors.forename: Ralf
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Trippe
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Weiss
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D005133:Eye Movements; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000150:complications / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology*; D014796:Visual Perception