Citation

Helzer EG, Connor-Smith JK, Reed MA. Anxiety Stress Coping 2009; 22(1): 57-76.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. egh42@cornell.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/10615800802272244

PMID

18791905

PMCID

PMC2629742

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of situational and dispositional factors on attentional biases toward social threat, and the impact of these attentional biases on distress in a sample of adolescents. The results suggest greater biases for personally relevant threat cues, as individuals reporting high social stress were vigilant to subliminal social threat cues, but not physical threat cues, and those reporting low social stress showed no attentional biases. Individual differences in fearful temperament and attentional control interacted to influence attentional biases, with fearful temperament predicting biases to supraliminal social threat only for individuals with poor attentional control. Multivariate analyses exploring relations between attentional biases for social threat and symptoms of anxiety and depression revealed that attentional biases alone were rarely related to symptoms. However, biases did interact with social stress, fearful temperament, and attentional control to predict distress. The results are discussed in terms of automatic and effortful cognitive mechanisms underlying threat cue processing.

Language: en