Selective attention for hyperventilatory sensations in panic disorder

According to cognitive theories, panic patients are assumed to display sele ctive attention for feared bodily sensations. To date there has only been i ndirect evidence for this based on performance on reaction time tasks such as the modified Stroop task and the dot probe detection task. In the presen t study a more direct attempt was made to investigate whether panic patient s show selective attention for feared sensations, in particular hyperventil atory sensations. A group of patients with panic disorder and a group of no rmal controls were compared on their performance on a reaction time task in which tones of different length had to be discriminated. During the task s ubjects were asked either to hyperventilate, to overbreathe under isocapnic conditions, or to make a neutral movement. No evidence for selective atten tion for hyperventilatory sensations was found. The article also discusses whether lack of finding interference during hyperventilation might be due t o methodological issues. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved .