Resumen de Anxiety, cognitive control and processing styles
During decades, researchers of emotion have been trying to explain how anxious people attend to the world. Most studies have been directed towards specific attentional mechanisms and affective material, and many times not distinguishing the effects of the different subtypes of anxiety (state, trait and pathological). The general aim of this thesis was to further study the relationship between anxiety and attention. In order to do so, we have used different tasks.
In the first section, we studied the effects of the different subtypes of anxiety (trait, state and clinical) on the alerting, orienting and executive control networks without emotional information. The most important results were that the anxiety subtypes modulate differently the attentional networks under conditions where the processing of affective information is not required. Trait-anxiety is related to less effective cognitive control processes, and state-anxiety is linked to over functioning of the alerting and orienting systems, whereas pathological anxiety seems to be a combination of the effects from trait and state, producing an attentional control deficit and greater orienting effect, specifically related to more disengagement difficulties. When we manipulated the affective valence of the alerting signal, by using auditory and visual emotional stimuli, we found that there were not differences in the efficiency of the alerting network neither as a function of the level and type of anxiety, nor as a function of the emotional value of the face or sound used as alerting signal. We think that when the alertness component of attention is mobilized, it does with a positive or negative valence, hence there are not differential effects between groups on the base of the affective nature of the stimulus eliciting alertness. The fact that alertness already incorporates an important emotional value might be a biological advantage with an important role for survival.
In the second section, we studied how the current mood-state make it different the way with which people tackle the task at hand. In one experiment we found that high and low state-anxiety participants showed different response styles under low perceptual load conditions when angry facial expressions were used as distracters, the experimental condition requiring greater attentional control for response inhibition, and thus where participants need to use efficiently the available task information to adjust their response. In the last experimental series, we found a consistent relationship between affective state and global vs. local processing. Specifically, participants with a positive mood state had an enhanced ability to correctly identify a face (global task), whereas the negative mood-state made participants better in a local task of search differences.
