TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wendt, Julia
A1  - Morriss, Jayne
T1  - An examination of intolerance of uncertainty and contingency instruction on multiple indices during threat acquisition and extinction training
JF  - International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology
N2  - Individuals who score high in self-reported Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) tend to find uncertainty aversive. Prior research has demonstrated that under uncertainty individuals with high IU display difficulties in updating learned threat associations to safety associations. Importantly, recent research has shown that providing contingency instructions about threat and safety contingencies (i.e. reducing uncertainty) to individuals with high IU promotes the updating of learned threat associations to safety associations. Here we aimed to conceptually replicate IU and contingency instruction-based effects by conducting a secondary analysis of self-reported IU, ratings, skin conductance, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data recorded during uninstructed/instructed blocks of threat acquisition and threat extinction training (n = 48). Generally, no significant associations were observed between self-reported IU and differential responding to learned threat and safety cues for any measure during uninstructed/instructed blocks of threat acquisition and threat extinction training. There was some tentative evidence that higher IU was associated with greater ratings of unpleasantness and arousal to the safety cue after the experiment and greater skin conductance response to the safety cue during extinction generally. Potential explanations for these null effects and directions for future research are discussed.
KW  - Acquisition
KW  - Extinction
KW  - Threat
KW  - Instructions
KW  - Intolerance of
KW  - Uncertainty
KW  - Skin conductance
KW  - fMRI
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2022.05.005
SN  - 0167-8760
SN  - 1872-7697
VL  - 177
SP  - 171
EP  - 178
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam [u.a.]
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wieser, Matthias J.
A1  - Hambach, Anna
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Neurophysiological correlates of attentional bias for emotional faces in socially anxious individuals
BT  - Evidence from a visual search task and N2pc
JF  - Biological psychology
N2  - Visual search paradigms have provided evidence for the enhanced capture of attention by threatening faces. Especially in social anxiety, hypervigilance for threatening faces has been found repeatedly across behavioral paradigms, whose reliability however have been questioned recently. In this EEG study, we sought to determine whether the detection of threat (angry faces) is specifically enhanced in individuals with high (HSA) compared to low social anxiety (LSA). In a visual search paradigm, the N2pc component of the event-related brain potential was measured as an electrophysiological indicator of attentional selection. Twenty-one HSA and twenty-one LSA participants were investigated while searching for threatening or friendly targets within an array of neutral faces, or neutral targets within threatening or friendly distractors. Whereas no differences were found in reaction times, HSA showed significant higher detection rates for angry faces, whereas LSA showed a clear ‘happiness bias’. HSA also showed enhanced N2pc amplitudes in response to emotional facial expressions (angry and happy), indicating a general attentional bias for emotional faces. Overall, the results show that social anxiety may be characterized not only by a spatial attentional bias for threatening faces, but for emotional faces in general. In addition, the results further demonstrate the utility of the N2pc component in capturing subtle attentional biases.
KW  - N2pc
KW  - EEG
KW  - Social anxiety
KW  - Facial expression
KW  - Threat
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2018.01.004
SN  - 0301-0511
SN  - 1873-6246
VL  - 132
SP  - 192
EP  - 201
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -