University of Southampton

About: University of Southampton is a education organization based out in Southampton, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Laser. The organization has 37184 authors who have published 99400 publications receiving 3462915 citations. The organization is also known as: Southampton University & Soton Uni.

Eye movements to smoking-related pictures in smokers: relationship between attentional biases and implicit and explicit measures of stimulus valence

Abstract: Aims To investigate biases in overt orienting of attention to smoking-related cues in cigarette smokers, and to examine the relationship between measures of visual orienting and the affective and motivational valence of smoking cues. Design Smokers and non-smokers took part in a single session in which their attentional and evaluative responses to smoking-related and matched control pictures were recorded. Participants Twenty smokers and 25 non-smokers. Measurements Direction and duration of gaze was measured while participants completed a visual probe task. Subjective and cognitive-experimental measures of the motivational and affective valence of the stimuli were recorded. Findings Smokers, but not non-smokers, maintained their gaze for longer on smoking-related pictures than control pictures. They were also faster to detect probes that replaced smoking-related than control pictures, consistent with an attentional bias for smoking-related cues. Furthermore, smokers showed greater preferences for smoking-related than control pictures, compared with non-smokers, on both the subjective (explicit) and cognitive-experimental (implicit) indices of stimulus valence. Within smokers, longer initial fixations of gaze on smoking-related pictures were associated with a bias to rate the smoking pictures more positively, with greater approach tendencies for smoking pictures on the cognitive-experimental task, and with a greater urge to smoke. Conclusions These results demonstrate that smokers show biased attentional orientating to smoking cues, which is related to craving and the affective and motivational valence of the stimuli.

BRIEF REPORT Time course of attentional bias for threat scenes: Testing the vigilance‐avoidance hypothesis

Abstract: The study tested the vigilance-avoidance hypothesis, which proposes that anxiety-related attentional biases vary over time (i.e., initial vigilance for high threat cues, followed by avoidance). To investigate this, pictorial stimuli, which included scenes of injury, violence, and death, were presented in a visual probe task for two exposure durations: 500 ms and 1500 ms. Results showed that, in comparison with low trait anxious participants, high trait anxious individuals were more vigilant for high threat scenes at the shorter exposure duration (500 ms), and showed no attentional bias at the longer duration. However, the results also indicated significant avoidance of high threat scenes at the longer exposure duration in participants with high levels of blood-injury fear. These findings are discussed in relation to recent research indicating that anxiety and fear may reflect two distinct aversive motivational systems, which may be characterised by different patterns of cognitive bias.