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

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.