中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: A wealth of research demonstrates that anxious individuals display an attentional bias towards threatening information. But, patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) attend to more various types of threat stimuli that contain emotional meaning. Our study used worry-related threat stimuli to investigate whether the threat and worry-related contents of a stimulus affect the level of attentional bias in GAD patients on a dot-probe task. Method: Forty-seven GAD patients (mean age = 45.37; 19 males; 11 pure GAD patients and 36 GAD co-morbid with other neurosis) and 39 control participants (without a diagnosismean age = 45.62; 18 males; without diagnosis) completed the dot-probe task using 2 groups of threat words (high worry-related threat stimuli and low worry-related threat stimuli) as the stimulus material. Results: The GAD participants displayed substantial attentional bias for the low worry-related threat words as compared to the control group. The GAD participants also exhibited avoidant tendencies when presented with the high worryrelated threat words. Conclusion: Our study did not fully support this hypothesis. These results endeavored to explain the participants' subjective threat perceptions toward the stimulus material, and the possible influence of these perceptions on their attentional biases performance using the dot-probe task.