The present study aimed to determine whether persistent threat-related attentional capture can result from instructional learning, when participants acquire knowledge of the aversive qualities of a stimulus through verbal instruction. Fifty-four nonclinical adults first performed a visual search task in which a green or red circle was presented as a target. They were instructed that one of these two colors might be paired with an electric shock if they responded slowly or inaccurately, whereas the other color was never associated with shock. However, no shocks were actually delivered. In a subsequent test phase, in which participants were explicitly informed that shocks were no longer possible, former-target-color stimuli were presented as distractors in a visual search task for a shape-defined target. In both tasks, although participants were never exposed to the electric shock, we observed a significant correlation between threat-related attentional priority and state anxiety. Our results demonstrate that exposure to a stimulus with the belief that it could be threatening is sufficient to generate a persistent attentional bias toward that stimulus, but this effect is modulated by state anxiety. Attentional biases for fear-relevant stimuli have been implicated in anxiety disorders, and our findings demonstrate that for anxious participants, attentional biases can be entirely the product of erroneous beliefs concerning the linking between stimuli and possible outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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与威胁相关的注意力捕获的教学学习受到状态焦虑的调节。

本研究旨在确定当参与者通过口头指令获得有关刺激的厌恶性质的知识时，是否可以通过教学学习来产生与威胁相关的持续注意力捕获。54 名非临床成年人首先执行视觉搜索任务，其中将绿色或红色圆圈作为目标。他们被告知，如果反应缓慢或不准确，这两种颜色中的一种可能与电击相关，而另一种颜色则与电击无关。然而，实际上并没有产生任何冲击。在随后的测试阶段，参与者被明确告知不再可能进行电击，在针对形状定义的目标的视觉搜索任务中，前目标颜色刺激被呈现为干扰因素。在这两项任务中，尽管参与者从未受到电击，但我们观察到与威胁相关的注意力优先级和状态焦虑之间存在显着相关性。我们的结果表明，接触某种刺激并相信它可能具有威胁性就足以产生对该刺激的持续注意力偏差，但这种效应受到状态焦虑的调节。对与恐惧相关的刺激的注意偏差与焦虑症有关，我们的研究结果表明，对于焦虑的参与者来说，注意偏差可能完全是关于刺激和可能结果之间联系的错误信念的产物。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。