Enhanced Attentional Bias Variability in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its Relationship to More General Impairments in Cognitive Control.

ABSTRACT: Hypervigilance towards threat is one of the defining features of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This symptom predicts that individuals with PTSD will be biased to attend to potential dangers in the environment. However, cognitive tasks designed to assess visual-spatial attentional biases have shown mixed results. A newer proposal suggests that attentional bias is not a static phenomenon, but rather is characterized by fluctuations towards and away from threat. Here, we tested 28 combat Veterans with PTSD and 28 control Veterans on a dot probe task with negative-neutral word pairs. Combat-related words and generically negative words were presented in separate blocks. Replicating previous results, neither group showed a bias to attend towards or away from threat, but PTSD patients sh

SUBMITTER: Swick D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5673957 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature