Chronometrics of Attentional Processes in Anxiety Disorders

Two experimental paradigms were used to test for the presence of attentional bias in patients with panic disorders and social phobias. The results of the first experiment on the detection of visual probes employing the paradigm of MacLeod et al. indicate specific affects as a function of the physical or social emotional connotation of the probe words. Attention of patients with panic disorders was apparently restricted to words denoting physical threat. No effect related to the threatening connotation of words was observed for the social-phobia patients. In contrast, the control subjects presented an avoidance reaction for social-threat words. Experiment 2 showed an interference effect for words indicating physical threat in the panic disorder patients. However, the same subjects exhibited avoidance of social-threat words. The distractor effect for physical-threat words was only observed when these words were displayed in the left visual hemifield. This finding is interpreted as strengthening the hypothesis of a right-hemispheric specialization for the processing of words with emotional content.