SELECTIVE ATTENTION TO FOOD-RELATED STIMULI IN HUNGER - ARE ATTENTIONAL BIASES SPECIFIC TO EMOTIONAL AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL STATES, OR ARE THEY ALSO FOUND IN NORMAL DRIVE STATES
K. Mogg et al., SELECTIVE ATTENTION TO FOOD-RELATED STIMULI IN HUNGER - ARE ATTENTIONAL BIASES SPECIFIC TO EMOTIONAL AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL STATES, OR ARE THEY ALSO FOUND IN NORMAL DRIVE STATES, Behaviour research and therapy, 36(2), 1998, pp. 227-237
Previous work has indicated that anxiety disorders and eating disorder
s are associated with selective processing of stimuli relevant to pati
ents' concerns (e.g. Mathews and MacLeod, 1994; Annual Review of Psych
ology, 45, 25-50; Channon et al., 1988; British Journal of Clinical Ps
ychology, 27, 259-260). A dot probe task was used to investigate wheth
er attentional biases are also a feature of a normal drive state. Spec
ifically, we examined whether hunger is associated with biases in sele
ctive attention and in pre-attentive processes for food-relevant stimu
li. Subjects with high levels of hunger showed a greater attentional b
ias for food-related words presented in a suprathreshold exposure cond
ition (words shown for 500 msec), in comparison with those with low hu
nger. There was no evidence in the present study of a hunger-related b
ias in pre-attentive processes (i.e. when words were shown for 14 msec
and masked). Results suggest that a non-emotional motivational state,
such as hunger, is associated with a bias in certain aspects of infor
mation processing, such as selective attention, for stimuli that are r
elevant to the motivational state. Findings are discussed in relation
to recent research into emotion-related cognitive biases. (C) 1998 Els
evier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.