Self-help Articles

by Elaine Fox, Ph.D. Riccardo Russo, Ph.D. Robert Bowles, Ph.D. & Kevin Dutton, Ph.D.

Terrorist attachs, such as that wich occurred on American soil on 9/11/01, leave people glued to their television sets or staring at newspaper and magazine pictures.

Many people then find it hard to concentrate after seeing such images as the aftermath of hijackings of four U.S. airlines that killed thousands of Americans and destroyed foundations of the American landscape.

Memories of the images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center, people leaping out of the WTC buildings and the pentagon on fire stay with people.

The reason people can't shift their attention back so easily to their normal routines, say experts on anxiety and visual attention, is that threatening images hold our attention much longer than non-threatening ones, especially for those who were more anxious than the average person before the attacks.

According to a study on anxiety and visual attention, people with heightened anxiety who are exposed to threatening stimuli may find it increasingly difficult to concentrate on anything but the threatening images.

Attention is not only more quickly drawn to threatening stimuli for people who are anxious than for people who are not, but anxious people have trouble disengaging their attention from threatening visual images, explain the authors.

In five experiments, 282 college students and staff from the University of Essex aged 17 to 60 participated in the Stroop and dot-probe procedures to measure how threatening stimuli influence visual attention. Both methods, which are widely used, have participants view threat-related or negative stimuli and neutral visual stimuli at the same time.

The participants are asked to attend to one while ignoring the other. All the participants included in these experiments were not experiencing clinical levels of anxiety, but some were experiencing subclinical levels of anxiety measured by an anxiety scale.

"These experiments are evidence that anxious people are not just shifting their attention toward the location of threat," said Fox. "They may be unable to disengage their attention to a noticed threat as quickly."

The experiments used in the study used a procedure developed by University of Washington psychologist Michael I. Posner, Ph.D., and colleagues, known as "exogenous cueing". The procedure provides a test of visual attention that - unlike other measures - distinguishes between two components of attention: attentional shift and attentional disengagement.

The findings provide us with valuable information that could enable us to "train those suffering from anxiety to quickly shift their attention away from threatening stimuli, potentially reducing the attention bias and ultimately preventing the anxiety," said Fox.

To prevent negative psychological effects, all people, and especially those who know they are anxious, would do well to force themselves to shift their attention away from threatening images rather than stay focused on them. Minimizing nervous system overload is a skill, one that is especially needed after terrorrist attacks.

Article: "Do Threatening Stimuli Draw of Hold Visual Attention in Subclinical Anxiety?" Elaine Fox, Ph.D., Riccardo Russo, Ph.D., Robert Bowles, Ph.D. & Kevin Dutton, Ph.D., University of Essex; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol 130, No. 4.

This information received from the American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC.