title: Attentional bias in clinical depression and anxiety: The impact of emotional and non-emotional distracting information.
abstract: Both anxiety and major depression disorder (MDD) were reported to involve a maladaptive selective attention mechanism, associated with bias toward negative stimuli. Previous studies investigated attentional bias using distractors that required processing as part of task settings, and therefore, in our view, these distractors should be regarded as task-relevant. Here, we applied a unique task that used peripheral distractors that presented emotional and spatial information simultaneously. Notably, the emotional information was not associated in any way to the task, and thus was task-irrelevant. The spatial information, however, was task-relevant as it corresponded with task instructions. Corroborating previous findings, anxious patients showed attentional bias toward negative information. MDD patients showed no indication of this bias. Spatial information influenced all groups similarly. These results indicate that anxiety, but not MDD, is associated with an inherent negative information bias, further illustrating that the two closely related disorders are characterized by different processing patterns.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel; Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel Haifa, Israel. Electronic address: l.vidne@gmail.com.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lichtenstein-Vidne
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel Haifa, Israel.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Okon-Singer
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Cohen
authors.affiliation: Beer- Sheva Mental Health Center, Israel and the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Todder
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Division of Experimental Psychology and Neuropsychology, University of Bern, Switzerland.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Aue
authors.affiliation: Beer- Sheva Mental Health Center, Israel and the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Nemets
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Henik
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D000070379:Attentional Bias; D003865:Major Depressive Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D065855:Spatial Processing
keywords: Anxiety; Attentional bias; Depression; Emotional distractors; Task-relevance