Valdivia-Salas, S., Forsyth, J. P., Berghoff, C., & Ritz, T. (2014). Using panicogenic inhalations of carbon-dioxide enriched air to induce attentional bias for threat: Implications for the development of anxiety disorders. Cognition and Emotion, 28, 1474-1482.
The tendency for anxious individuals to selectively attend to threatening information is believed to cause and exacerbate anxious emotional responding in a self-perpetuating cycle. The present study sought to examine the relation between differential interoceptive conditioning using carbon dioxide inhalation as a panicogenic unconditioned stimulus (US) and the development of Stroop color-naming interference to various non-word conditioned stimuli (CSs). Healthy university students (N = 27) underwent the assessment of color-naming interference to reinforced CS+ and non-reinforced CS- non-words prior to and following differential fear conditioning. Participants showed greater magnitude electrodermal and verbal-evaluative responses to the CS+ over the CS- non-word following interoceptive conditioning, and demonstrated the expected slower color-naming latencies to the CS+ compared to the CS- non-word from baseline to post-conditioning. We discuss the relation between fear learning and the emergence of attentional bias for threat to further understand the maintenance of anxiety disorders.