The relationship between worry and attentional bias to threat cues signalling controllable and uncontrollable dangers.

Abstract

People vary in the frequency with which they worry and there is large variation in the degree to which this worry disrupts their everyday functioning. Heightened tendency to experience disruptive worry is characterised by an attentional bias towards threat. While this attentional bias is often considered maladaptive, it can be adaptive when it concerns threat cues signalling dangers that can be mitigated through personal action. In this case, the resulting worry may increase the likelihood of this action being taken, with beneficial rather than disruptive consequences for everyday functioning. Thus, depending on its focus, attentional bias to threat could potentially drive worry that is high or low in disruptiveness. The current study addressed this possibility, by testing the novel hypothesis that the degree to which worry is disruptive is a function of the degree to which this attentional bias concerns all threat cues, rather than being restricted to threat cues signalling controllable dangers. Participants completed a novel probe task assessing their attention to threat cues signalling a future danger that could be controlled on some blocks, but not on others. Thus, the task revealed the degree to which their selective attention to threat cues was 'aligned' with danger controllability, by being more evident on blocks that permitted participant control of the danger signalled by the threat cues. The results indicate, contradicting the hypothesis under test, participants who reported high levels of disruptive worry demonstrated alignment of attentional bias to variations in danger controllability, whereas this was not the case for participants who reported high levels of non-disruptive worry. While caution is needed in the interpretation of the results due to methodological limitations, this study provides a new conceptual and methodological framework for future research on the attentional basis of individual differences in the tendency to experience disruptive vs non-disruptive worry.