Attentional Bias Toward Unpleasant Faces In Non-anxious Populations Using The Dot-probe Task

A number of studies using the dot-probe task have reported the existence of an attentional bias to angry faces in participants who rate highly on scales of anxiety, however, no equivalent bias has been observed in non-anxious populations, despite evidence to the contrary from studies using other tasks. In this current study, the dot-probe task is used to investigate negativity bias and the mechanism of attentional bias in non-anxious individuals.The whole study consisted of three sub-studies; the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) was applied in the study to select non-anxious individuals. The first experiment was to test whether or not a given stimulus is actually capturing attention, and whether there existed an attentional bias to unpleasant facial expressions in non-anxious individuals.42of the56volunteers were selected and divided into two groups(exposure duration:100ms,500ms), there were no significant differences between the two groups in sex, age and STAI scores.24non-anxious individuals of the31volunteers were selected as participants in the second experiment. This experiment was used to investigated whether there existed attentional biases toward all the four kinds of negative faces (angry, disgusted, fear and sad) in non-anxious individuals at the exposure duration of100ms, and what was the mechanism of the attentional negativity bias.25non-anxious individuals of the29volunteers were selected as participants in the second experiment. This experiment was used to investigated whether there existed attentional biases toward all the four kinds of negative faces (angry, disgusted, fear and sad) in non-anxious individuals at the exposure duration of500ms, and what was the mechanism of the attentional negativity bias.The result indicated that:1. The evidence shows the existence of an attention bias to angry faces and fear faces in non-anxious participants when the stimuli presented for100ms which refers to automatic initial attention allocation.2. There was no significant attention bias to emotional faces in non-anxious participants when the stimuli presented for500ms which refers to the first shifted attention allocation.3. The use of baseline trials by trials with only neutral faces as stimuli in the current experiments suggests the initial bias to threat arises from a faster orienting to the threatening stimulus, rather than disengagement difficulty. Furthermore, it is easier to disengage attention from disgust and fear faces compare to neutral faces.