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Furious snarling: Teeth-exposure and anxiety-related attentional bias towards angry faces
Dot-probe studies consistently show that high trait anxious individuals have an attentional bias towards threatening faces. However, little is known about the influence of perceptual confounds of specific emotional expressions on this effect. Teeth-exposure was recently recognized as an important fa...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6258523/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30481190 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207695 |
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author | Wirth, Benedikt Emanuel Wentura, Dirk |
author_facet | Wirth, Benedikt Emanuel Wentura, Dirk |
author_sort | Wirth, Benedikt Emanuel |
collection | PubMed |
description | Dot-probe studies consistently show that high trait anxious individuals have an attentional bias towards threatening faces. However, little is known about the influence of perceptual confounds of specific emotional expressions on this effect. Teeth-exposure was recently recognized as an important factor for the occurrence of attentional bias towards angry faces in a closely related paradigm (the face-in-the-crowd paradigm). Therefore, we investigated the effect of exposed teeth on attentional bias towards angry faces in the dot-probe task. Participants (N = 74) were asked to classify probe stimuli that were preceded by two simultaneously presented face cues, one angry and the other neutral. Half of the angry faces had exposed teeth, the other half had concealed teeth. Afterwards, participants completed the trait anxiety scale of the STAI. For angry faces with non-exposed teeth, we found the expected positive correlation (r = .441) of trait anxiety with the attentional bias score (reaction times for probes replacing the neutral face minus reaction times for probes replacing the angry face). However, we found no influence of trait anxiety on attentional bias towards angry faces with exposed teeth. These results suggest that natural low-level stimulus confounds of emotional faces like exposed teeth can affect the manifestation of anxiety-related attentional biases towards angry faces in the dot-probe task. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6258523 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-62585232018-12-06 Furious snarling: Teeth-exposure and anxiety-related attentional bias towards angry faces Wirth, Benedikt Emanuel Wentura, Dirk PLoS One Research Article Dot-probe studies consistently show that high trait anxious individuals have an attentional bias towards threatening faces. However, little is known about the influence of perceptual confounds of specific emotional expressions on this effect. Teeth-exposure was recently recognized as an important factor for the occurrence of attentional bias towards angry faces in a closely related paradigm (the face-in-the-crowd paradigm). Therefore, we investigated the effect of exposed teeth on attentional bias towards angry faces in the dot-probe task. Participants (N = 74) were asked to classify probe stimuli that were preceded by two simultaneously presented face cues, one angry and the other neutral. Half of the angry faces had exposed teeth, the other half had concealed teeth. Afterwards, participants completed the trait anxiety scale of the STAI. For angry faces with non-exposed teeth, we found the expected positive correlation (r = .441) of trait anxiety with the attentional bias score (reaction times for probes replacing the neutral face minus reaction times for probes replacing the angry face). However, we found no influence of trait anxiety on attentional bias towards angry faces with exposed teeth. These results suggest that natural low-level stimulus confounds of emotional faces like exposed teeth can affect the manifestation of anxiety-related attentional biases towards angry faces in the dot-probe task. Public Library of Science 2018-11-27 /pmc/articles/PMC6258523/ /pubmed/30481190 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207695 Text en © 2018 Wirth, Wentura http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Wirth, Benedikt Emanuel Wentura, Dirk Furious snarling: Teeth-exposure and anxiety-related attentional bias towards angry faces |
title | Furious snarling: Teeth-exposure and anxiety-related attentional bias towards angry faces |
title_full | Furious snarling: Teeth-exposure and anxiety-related attentional bias towards angry faces |
title_fullStr | Furious snarling: Teeth-exposure and anxiety-related attentional bias towards angry faces |
title_full_unstemmed | Furious snarling: Teeth-exposure and anxiety-related attentional bias towards angry faces |
title_short | Furious snarling: Teeth-exposure and anxiety-related attentional bias towards angry faces |
title_sort | furious snarling: teeth-exposure and anxiety-related attentional bias towards angry faces |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6258523/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30481190 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207695 |
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