Expectancy biases in fear and anxiety and their link to biases in attention
Section snippets
Expectancy bias
It is important to distinguish two types of biased expectations (Aue and Hoeppli, 2012, Foa and Kozak, 1986). Catastrophic thinking in exaggerated fear, phobia, and anxiety may result both from overestimating the likelihood of facing an anticipated threat source (encounter expectancy bias; referred to as probability by Foa & Kozak, 1986) and from overestimating the likelihood that such a confrontation with the threat source will have severe consequences (consequences expectancy bias; referred
Review of research on expectancy bias
Whether or not we anticipate the possibility of being confronted with a threatening situation in the near or far future should have a major impact on our experience of fear.5
Review of research on attention bias
In contrast to biased expectancies, attentional biases have been extensively studied and therefore are only partially reviewed here. Table 2 provides a summary of the evidence regarding different attention biases in healthy, anxious, fearful, and phobic individuals. Fig. 2 displays the most prominent paradigms used in examining attention biases in fear and anxiety.10
Research linking biases in expectancies and attention
To date, research on both healthy and pathological forms of fear has largely disregarded possible relations between expectancy and attention biases. We will start with some theoretical considerations about a link between diverse kinds of information-processing biases in fear and anxiety. We will then describe some first studies investigating associations between distortions in expectancy and attention and discuss their implications. We will conclude this section with an additional consideration
Extending the focus to underlying mechanisms and other information-processing biases
From the studies reviewed earlier, we postulate a link between attention and expectancy bias, with attention bias causally influencing expectancies. While our data are suggestive, we need more research in order to determine causality and to gain better insight into the concrete mechanisms underlying the presumed transfer of one bias into the other. One way toward this aim consists in the simultaneous consideration of other biases that have been observed in fear and anxiety (e.g., memory bias,
Some future directions
Future envisaged developments constitute an additional distinction between the different subtypes of the biases considered here (e.g., attention bias: early attention engagement, early attention disengagement, later attentional avoidance; expectancy bias: consequences, encounter; memory bias: encoding, consolidation, retrieval). As we outlined in the previous section, early attention biases in anxiety and phobia (e.g., facilitated initial engagement in threat) may conceivably have a causal
Conclusions and outlook
The evidence summarized in this article points to robust attention and expectancy biases among anxious, fearful, and phobic individuals. Recent studies revealed an association between these biases, emphasizing the need for future examination of their shared neurocognitive mechanisms. Such research efforts are crucial for a better understanding of processing biases in threatening situations and may have important theoretical and clinical implications. In future research, terminology—especially
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation grant PZ00P1_140060 awarded to T. Aue and by the Marie Curie Actions CIG grant 34206 and the National Institute for Psychobiology in Israel Young Investigator Research grant 145-14-15 awarded to H. Okon-Singer. We would like to thank Noga Cohen and Tomer Shechner for their helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.
References (150)
- et al.
The effects of single-session interpretation modification on attention bias in socially anxious individuals
Journal of Anxiety Disorders
(2010) - et al.
Covariation bias and its physiological correlates in panic disorder patients
Journal of Anxiety Disorders
(2005) - et al.
The emotional Stroop effect in anxiety disorders: General emotionality or disorder specificity?
Journal of Anxiety Disorders
(2001) - et al.
Are attentional bias and memory bias for negative words causally related?
Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
(2013) - et al.
The role of threat–expectancy in acute pain: Effects on attentional bias, coping strategy effectiveness and response to pain
Pain
(2005) - et al.
Attentional biases for negative information in induced and naturally occurring dysphoria
Behaviour Research and Therapy
(1997) - et al.
Lateral prefrontal cortex mediates the cognitive modification of attentional bias
Biological Psychiatry
(2010) - et al.
Investigating the construct validity of intolerance of uncertainty and its unique relationship with worry
Journal of Anxiety Disorders
(2006) - et al.
Cognitive processes in anxiety
Advances in Behaviour Research and Therapy
(1983) - et al.
Mechanisms of attentional biases towards threat in anxiety disorders: An integrative review
Clinical Psychology Review
(2010)
Examining information processing biases in spider phobia using the rapid serial visual presentation paradigm
Journal of Anxiety Disorders
The expectancy bias model of selective associations: The relationship of judgements of CS dangerousness, CS–UCS similarity and prior fear to a priori and a posteriori covariation assessments
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Covariation bias and electrodermal responding in spider phobics before and after behavioural treatment
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Spider phobia: Interaction of disgust and perceived likelihood of involuntary physical contact
Anxiety Disorders
Selective attention and avoidance on a pictorial cueing task during stress in clinically anxious and depressed patients
Behaviour Research and Therapy
The combined cognitive bias hypothesis in depression
Clinical Psychology Review
Involuntary future projections are as frequent as involuntary memories, but more positive
Consciousness and Cognition
A meta-analysis of the relation of intolerance of uncertainty to symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and obsessive–compulsive disorder
Clinical Psychology Review
When spiders appear suddenly: Spider-phobic patients are distracted by task-irrelevant spiders
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Intolerance of uncertainty and intolerance of ambiguity: Similarities and differences
Personality and Individual Differences
Information-processing bias in social phobia
Clinical Psychology Review
Imagery and interpretations in social phobia: Support for the combined cognitive biases hypothesis
Behavior Therapy
A comparison of intolerance of uncertainty in analogue obsessive–compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder
Journal of Anxiety Disorders
Expectancy models of preparedness effects: A UCS–Expectancy bias in phylogenetic and ontogenetic fear-relevant stimuli
Behavior Therapy
Memory-guided attention: Control from multiple memory systems
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Covariation bias for phylogenetic versus ontogenetic fear-relevant stimuli
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Selective attention to threat in the dot probe paradigm: Differentiating vigilance and difficulty to disengage
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Components of attentional bias to threat in high trait anxiety: Facilitated engagement, impaired disengagement, and attentional avoidance
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Attention bias modification (ABM) as a treatment for child and adolescent anxiety: A systematic review
Journal of Affective Disorders
Cognitive factors in social anxiety and its treatment
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Explicit and implicit memory bias in social phobia: The role of subdiagnostic type
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Cognitive biases in anxiety and attention to threat
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Are covariation biases attributable to a priori expectancy biases?
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Danger expectancies and insight in acrophobia
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders
Dissociations between covariation bias and expectancy bias for fear-relevant stimuli
Cognition and Emotion
Attention training in individuals with generalized social phobia: A randomized controlled trial
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
Automatic activation and strategic avoidance of threat-relevant information in social phobia
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
Dissociating emotion and attention functions in the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus
Neuropsychology
Varying expectancies and the attention bias in phobic and non-phobic individuals
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
Evidence for an encounter expectancy bias in fear of spiders
Cognition and Emotion
Brain systems underlying expectancy bias in spider phobia
Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience
Visual avoidance in phobia: Particularities in neural activity, autonomic responding, and cognitive risk evaluations
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
Neural correlates of wishful thinking
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Social learning theory
Research review: Attention bias modification (ABM): A novel treatment for anxiety disorders
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
Cognitive bias modification for anxiety: Current evidence and future directions
Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics
Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders
Anxiety disorders and phobias: A cognitive perspective
Cited by (73)
The mediating effect of stress reactivity in the 18-year bidirectional relationship between generalized anxiety and depression severity
2023, Journal of Affective DisordersThe negativity bias and perceived return distributions: Evidence from a pandemic
2023, Journal of Financial EconomicsVigilance: A novel conditioned fear response that resists extinction
2022, Biological PsychologyTranslation, Cross-Cultural Adaptation, and Psychometric Properties of the Chinese Version of the Surgical Fear Questionnaire
2022, Journal of Perianesthesia NursingYou see what you avoid: Fear of spiders and avoidance are associated with predominance of spiders in binocular rivalry
2022, Journal of Anxiety Disorders