The association between attentional bias and fear potentiated startle in an emotional cuing- and fear-potentiated startle paradigm.

Abstract

Recent studies show that all individuals show attentional biases to threat when presented with an unambiguous or highly threatening situation. However, it is still unknown if these biases are related to an oversensitive threat detection system that high trait anxious individuals are thought to possess. To test this hypothesis, this study examined the relationship between attentional biases to threat, fear- potentiated startle and skin conductance responses. An unselected sample of participants (n=30) completed an emotional cuing task and a startle- and skin conductance procedure in which they were presented with neutral face stimuli. One of the faces (threat cue) was followed by an aversive noise while the other was not (neutral cue). Startle- and skin conductance responses were then measured. Participants reacted faster to valid trials than to invalid trials on the emotional cuing task. However, they did not differ in the speed of their responses on either neutral or threatening trials. Contrary to expectation, skin conductance responses were not related to any of the measures, while fear potentiated startle only showed a negative relation with engagement scores. Implications are discussed.