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Toward and away from spiders: eye-movements in spider-fearful participants

  • Basic Neurosciences, Genetics and Immunology - Original Article
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Abstract

Highly fearful individuals show attentional biases toward threat. However, it is still unclear whether initial engagement of attention toward threat or difficulties to disengage from threat is the underlying mechanism. We used eye-tracking to investigate how quickly fear-relevant pictures are identified and whether they distract from the allocation of attention toward neutral targets. Pairs of fear-relevant and neutral pictures were presented to 18 high and 16 low spider-fearful participants. They were instructed to either fixate on a target or to fixate on the opposite picture, while eye movements were monitored continuously. Overall, fear-relevant targets were fixated more quickly than neutral targets. Spider-fearful participants had longer latencies when they had to identify the fear-relevant but fixate the neutral picture. Thus, attentional allocation toward threat was not specifically enhanced in fearful participants. Instead, they had difficulties to disengage attention from fear-relevant information. This disengagement deficit could be a cause, a correlate, or the result of phobic fear.

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Notes

  1. Our study design was comparable to the so called antisaccade task (for an overview see Everling and Fischer 1998; Hutton and Ettinger 2006), but we modified the paradigm and presented two pictures per trial instead of one.

  2. Analogous to the mean latencies the attentional bias scores were calculated for the correct fixations.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the support by the Research Group Emotion and Behavior which is sponsored by the German Research Society (DFG).

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Correspondence to Georg W. Alpers.

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Gerdes, A.B.M., Pauli, P. & Alpers, G.W. Toward and away from spiders: eye-movements in spider-fearful participants. J Neural Transm 116, 725–733 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-008-0167-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-008-0167-8

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