Don't Fear The Reaper? The Effects of Stress on Visual Attention and Threat-Processing
Abstract: In the current study, the aim was to investigate whether attentional bias—an automatic and nonconscious pre-attentive process of filtering sensory information for emotional relevance—could be induced in normal students, by manipulating levels of stress. In a within-subject experimental design where each participant completed 3 word search puzzles, it was predicted that the ratio at which participants found negative words to neutral words would positively correlate with the level of induced stress, ranging from low-medium-high. A one-way repeated measures ANOVA revealed no significant results. This may be due to faulty experimental design, as commentaries made by participants revealed that many of them experienced the situation as stressful, and that negative words did seem to “pop out” or “be everywhere.” This may suggest that attentional bias was indeed induced, even though instruments used were not able to adequately measure it. Results are discussed, and improvements for studies using word search puzzles to study attention are suggested.
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