Aversive Responses to Stereotypic STEM Images Predicts Women’s Long–Term STEM Memories and Underperformance in Math

Social identity and stereotype threat (ST) are situational stressors that increase arousal and negative affect and impair performance when women are outnumbered by men. One consequence of these effects could be that women develop learned aversions towards stigmatized STEM domains. Five studies tested whether stereotypic STEM images (STEMIs) prompt aversive responses that predict ST-like outcomes, including underperformance in ST contexts and more negative ST-oriented memories over time. Using a dot-probe paradigm, Studies 1 and 2 found that women perceived STEMIs as more negatively arousing compared to men, but only ST women exhibited greater arousal responses to STEMIs compared to stereotypic non-STEM images (NonSTEMIs) and underperformed; men in this context showed a similar arousal response to STEMIs and NonSTEMIs and performed better. Study 3 replicated this effect among female STEM majors and linked aversive responses to more negative affect laden memories for the STEM lab experience five weeks later. Using EEG, Study 4 found that enhanced processing of STEMIs presented during an attentional blink task (indexed via increased communication between occipital and prefrontal cortical regions) predicted underperformance on a math test among ST women but marginally better performance among men. Study 5 mitigated ST underperformance effects among women utilizing a dot-probe training paradigm that blunted arousal responses to STEMIs; instructing men to attend to STEMIs facilitated their performance. STEM aversions may thus facilitate ST-like effects, possibly defining what the “threat” in ST is, however, blunting aversions can attenuate these effects when women work alongside men in STEM performance situations.

Measuring Biases of Visual Attention: A Comparison of Four Tasks

Attention biases to stimuli with emotional content may play a role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. The most commonly used tasks in measuring and treating such biases, the dot-probe and spatial cueing tasks, have yielded mixed results, however. We assessed the sensitivity of four visual attention tasks (dot-probe, spatial cueing, visual search with irrelevant distractor and attentional blink tasks) to differences in attentional processing between threatening and neutral faces in 33 outpatients with a primary diagnosis of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and 26 healthy controls. The dot-probe and cueing tasks revealed no differential processing of neutral and threatening faces between the SAD and control groups. The irrelevant distractor task showed some sensitivity to differential processing for the SAD group, but the attentional blink task was uniquely sensitive to such differences in both groups, and revealed processing differences between the SAD and control groups. The attentional blink task also revealed interesting temporal dynamics of attentional processing of emotional stimuli and may provide a uniquely nuanced picture of attentional response to emotional stimuli. Our results therefore suggest that the attentional blink task is more suitable for measuring preferential attending to emotional stimuli and treating dysfunctional attention patterns than the more commonly used dot-probe and cueing tasks.

Autistic-traits, not anxiety, modulate implicit emotional guidance of attention in neurotypical adults

Although autistic and anxious traits are positively correlated, high levels of autistic traits are associated with poorer emotional guidance of attention (EGA) whilst high levels of anxious traits are associated with greater EGA. In order to better understand how these two trait dimensions influence EGA, we simultaneously examined the effects of anxiety and autistic traits in neurotypical adults on target identification in an attentional blink task. Analyses indicated that implicit EGA is attenuated in individuals with higher levels of autistic traits, but largely unaffected by variation in anxious traits. Our results suggest that anxiety plays a comparatively limited role in modulating implicit EGA and reinforces the importance of disentangling correlated individual differences when exploring the effects of personality, including emotional predisposition, on attention.

Evidence for an attention bias toward disgust in contamination fear

Although attention biases are common in various anxiety disorders, there is no consensus yet regarding attentional bias in obsessive–compulsive disorder. We assessed attention bias toward images involving contamination and disgust using an emotional attentional blink paradigm in a sample of university students high (HCF) or low (LCF) in contamination fear. Neutral, general-threat-, contamination-, and disgust-related images (T1) were presented followed by a discrimination task (T2) 200, 500, or 800 ms later within a rapid serial visual presentation stream of 20 images. The HCF group was overall less accurate on the attentional blink task. Response accuracy differed by image type and lag in the two groups at the trend level and revealed a large drop in performance 200 ms following presentation of disgusting images in the HCF group. No such differences were observed at later lags in the task. There were increases in negative affect following the task for the HCF but not the LCF group, which were correlated with contamination fear scores. The results suggest that a disgust-related attention bias may be present at early stages of information processing in people with contamination fear.

Measuring biases of visual attention: A comparison of 4 tasks

Observers typically attend preferentially to stimuli with emotional content over emotionally neutral ones. For some this attentional pull is abnormally strong, and such attention biases may play a role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. The assessment of potential biases is constrained by measurement methods. The tasks most commonly used to measure preferential attentional orienting to emotional stimuli, the dot-probe and spatial cueing tasks, have yielded mixed results. We assessed the sensitivity of 4 visual attention tasks (dot-probe, spatial cueing, visual search with irrelevant distractor and attentional blink tasks) to differences in attentional processing between threatening and neutral faces in 33 outpatients with a primary diagnosis of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and 26 healthy controls. The dot-probe and cueing tasks did not reveal any differential processing of neutral and threatening faces nor between the SAD and control groups. The irrelevant distractor task showed some sensitivity to differential processing of facial expression in the SAD group, but the attentional blink task was uniquely sensitive to such differences in both groups, and also revealed processing differences between the SAD and control groups. The attentional blink task revealed interesting temporal dynamics of attentional processing of emotional stimuli and may provide a uniquely nuanced picture of attentional response to emotional stimuli. The task may, therefore, be more suitable to measuring preferential attending to emotional stimuli and treating dysfunctional attention patterns than the more commonly used dot-probe and cueing tasks.