title: Fear-relevant change detection in spider-fearful and non-fearful participants.
abstract: Features of threatening stimuli are proposed to be processed fast and automatically, as they call for immediate attention. Phobic patients typically exhibit these attentional biases for stimuli that are relevant for their particular type of fear. In the present study, it was examined whether a change detection paradigm can be used to study attentional bias for fear-related stimuli. Twenty-five spider-fearful and 25 non-fearful participants were confronted with a series of pictures, in which sometimes a spider gradually appeared, sometimes a fear-irrelevant stimulus appeared, and sometimes no change occurred. Participants had to indicate whenever they noticed a change in the picture. Results showed a pattern of fear-relevant change detection. That is, spider changes were more frequently detected than fear-irrelevant changes, and spider-fearful participants detected more spider changes than non-fearful controls. Further, it was found that high-trait anxious participants did not detect more changes than low-trait anxious participants.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands. mayer@fsw.eur.nl
authors.forename: Birgit
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mayer
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Muris
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Vogel
authors.forename: Irina
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Nojoredjo
authors.forename: Harald
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Merckelbach
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D005239:Fear / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009426:Netherlands; D010551:Personality; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000523:psychology* / Q000628:therapy; D013112:Spiders