Can the processing of task-irrelevant threatening stimuli be inhibited? - The role of shape and valence in the saliency of threatening objects.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that attention is quickly oriented towards threatening stimuli, and that this attentional bias is difficult to inhibit. The root cause(s) of this bias may be attributable to the affective (e.g., valence) or visual features (e.g., shape) of threats. In two experiments (behavioral, eye-tracking), we tested which features play a bigger role in the salience of threats. In both experiments, participants looked for a neutral target (butterfly, lock) among other neutral objects. In half of the trials a threatening (snake, gun) or nonthreatening (but visually similar; worm, hairdryer) task-irrelevant distractor was also present at a near or far distance from the target. Behavioral results indicate that both distractor types interfered with task performance. Rejecting nonthreatening distractors as nontargets was easier when they were presented further from the target but distance had no effect when the distractor was threatening. Eye-tracking results showed that participants fixated less often (and for less time) on threatening compared to nonthreatening distractors. They also viewed targets for less time when a threatening distractor was present (compared to nonthreatening). Results suggest that visual features of threats are easier to suppress than affective features, and the latter may have a stronger role in eliciting attentional biases.

Psychological well-being, risk factors, and coping strategies with social isolation and new challenges in times of adversity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

OBJECTIVE: COVID-19 triggers anxiety and fear due to several reasons, and thus, dealing with it requires prolonged coping mechanisms. When the number of infections soared, to slow the spread, many governments decided to close universities and dormitories and move teaching to online platforms. The majority of the university students decided to move back home to their parents changing their social lives. Here, we aimed to point to risk, as well as protective factors, and understand the influence of these factors on both physical and psychological indicators of well-being. Further, to discover how university students cope with maintaining their social lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHOD: We collected online survey data from multiple university sources. Participants (N = 605) completed measures of emotion regulation strategies, knowledge on the disease, contamination fear, perceived social support, worrying and intolerance of uncertainty, quality of sleep, well-being, emotional stability, anxiety, and depression. RESULTS: Our results showed that the most prominent risk and protective factors that were most strongly associated with the indicators of well-being were rumination, catastrophizing, positive refocusing, and social support from family; respectively. CONCLUSION: These results have implications for professionals working with and helping (e.g., as counselors) people during the challenges of an emergency.

Task demands determine whether shape or arousal of a stimulus modulates competition for visual working memory resources.

It has been posited (Öhman, 1986) that the processing of threatening stimuli became prioritized during the course of mammalian evolution and that such objects may still enjoy an advantage in visual processing to this day. It has been well-documented that both mid-level visual features (i.e., conjunctions of low-level features) and the arousal level of threatening stimuli affect attentional allocation (Cisler & Koster, 2010; Wolfe & Horowitz, 2004). Despite this, few studies have investigated the effect these factors have on visual working memory resources. Here, we investigated these factors using a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, and by manipulating mid-level features (specifically, shape: similar vs. dissimilar) and the arousal level (non-threatening vs threatening) of the stimuli. Participants watched an RSVP stream in preparation for an upcoming memory test. Then, they completed a two-alternative forced-choice recognition memory test (with semantically matched foils) wherein they had to identify which item they had seen in the RSVP stream. Our results showed that when shape was a sufficient feature to discriminate the target from the other items in the stream, there was no effect of arousal (i.e., threat level) on reaction time or accuracy during the memory test. However, when the shapes of all the stimuli in the visual stream were highly similar, an effect of arousal appeared: When the target had a different arousal level than the background items (i.e., non-targets), performance was improved. Together, the results suggest that both mid-level visual features and arousal level can modulate competition for visual working memory resources.

Psychological well-being and coping strategies of elderly people during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary.

OBJECTIVE: During COVID-19 lockdown the enforced social isolation and other pandemic-related changes highly increased the risk of mental health problems. We aimed to discover how elderly people coped with the psychological burdens of pandemic and the social isolation in Hungary. METHODS: This study included 589 (441 females) Hungarian individuals, aged 60-83 (M = 68.1, SD = 4.46). We collected online survey data to reach a wide population of elderly. Results of hierarchical linear modelling and structural equation modelling (SEM) analyses established how the current life-changing circumstances, the intolerance of uncertainty, loneliness and social support influence the mental health (e.g. depression, anxiety, well-being) of the elderly. The model was used to explore how adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies mediated the effects. RESULTS: Findings showed that perceived change in mood, social connectedness, and quality of life was negatively affected by catastrophizing and loneliness; whereas positive refocusing and contamination fear had a positive effect. According to the SEM analysis, intolerance of uncertainty and loneliness directly affected mental health. Further, maladaptive emotion regulation strategies mediated the connection between intolerance of uncertainty, contamination fear, loneliness and mental health. Whereas adaptive emotion regulation strategy mediated the connection between social support from friends, contamination fear, loneliness and mental health. CONCLUSION: Overall, our research might help the understanding of how external and internal factors contributed to the well-being of elderly people during the COVID-19. The model can also be translated into professional interventions to develop coping strategies among elderly for the challenges of COVID-19 pandemic in their lives.

The effects of task-irrelevant threatening stimuli on orienting- and executive attentional processes under cognitive load.

Human visual attention is biased to rapidly detect threats in the environment so that our nervous system can initiate quick reactions. The processes underlying threat detection (and how they operate under cognitive load), however, are still poorly understood. Thus, we sought to test the impact of task-irrelevant threatening stimuli on the salience network and executive control of attention during low and high cognitive load. Participants were exposed to neutral or threatening pictures (with moderate and high arousal levels) as task-irrelevant distractors in near (parafoveal) and far (peripheral) positions while searching for numbers in ascending order in a matrix array. We measured reaction times and recorded eye-movements. Our results showed that task-irrelevant distractors primarily influenced behavioural measures during high cognitive load. The distracting effect of threatening images with moderate arousal level slowed reaction times for finding the first number. However, this slowing was offset by high arousal threatening stimuli, leading to overall shorter search times. Eye-tracking measures showed that participants fixated threatening pictures more later and for shorter durations compared to neutral images. Together, our results indicate a complex relationship between threats and attention that results not in a unitary bias but in a sequence of effects that unfold over time.

The connection and background mechanisms of social fears and problematic social networking site use: A structural equation modeling analysis.

Previous research warned that internet and social media use could have a negative effect on the social lives of excessive users. Based on the social compensation hypothesis, however, factors related to social fears could lead to problematic social networking site (SNS) use because individuals try to compensate for their offline popularity. It was shown that individuals with higher levels of social fears tend to prefer computer-mediated (CMC) instead of face to face (FTF) communication. Here, we aimed to create a model that shows the direct and indirect effects of social anxiety and self-esteem on problematic SNS use. A total of 215 participants filled out our survey including measures of social anxiety, self-esteem, fear of negative evaluation, social media and Internet addiction. Using structural equation modeling we tested the indirect and direct effects between the variables. Our results indicated that social anxiety and lower self-esteem could lead to favoring CMC over FTF communication, which may result in problematic internet (PIU) and SNS use as a compensatory behavior to cope with fear of negative evaluation. The indirect pathways might highlight relevant differences behind the motivation of PIU - anonymity - and problematic SNS use - control. Theoretical as well as practical implications are discussed.

Does Threat Have an Advantage After All? - Proposing a Novel Experimental Design to Investigate the Advantages of Threat-Relevant Cues in Visual Processing.

The automatic visual attentional procession of threatening stimuli over non-threatening cues has long been a question. The so-called classical visual search task (VST) has quickly become the go-to paradigm to investigate this. However, the latest results showed that the confounding results could originate from the shortcomings of the VST. Thus, here we propose a novel approach to the behavioral testing of the threat superiority effect. We conducted two experiments using evolutionary relevant and modern real-life scenes (e.g., forest or street, respectively) as a background to improve ecological validity. Participants had to find different targets in different spatial positions (close to fovea or periphery) using a touch-screen monitor. In Experiment 1 participants had to find the two most often used exemplar of the evolutionary and modern threatening categories (snake and gun, respectively), or neutral objects of the same category. In Experiment 2 we used more exemplars of each category. All images used were controlled for possible confounding low-level visual features such as contrast, frequency, brightness, and image complexity. In Experiment 1, threatening targets were found faster compared to neutral cues irrespective of the evolutionary relevance. However, in Experiment 2, we did not find an advantage for threatening targets over neutral ones. In contrast, the type of background, and spatial position of the target only affected the detection of neutral targets. Our results might indicate that some stimuli indeed have an advantage in visual processing, however, they are not highlighted based on evolutionary relevance of negative valence alone, but rather through different associational mechanisms.

Investigating evolutionary constraints on the detection of threatening stimuli in preschool children.

Numerous objects and animals could be threatening, and thus, children learn to avoid them early. Spiders and syringes are among the most common targets of fears and phobias of the modern word. However, they are of different origins: while the former is evolutionary relevant, the latter is not. We sought to investigate the underlying mechanisms that make the quick detection of such stimuli possible and enable the impulse to avoid them in the future. The respective categories of threatening and non-threatening targets were similar in shape, while low-level visual features were controlled. Our results showed that children found threatening cues faster, irrespective of the evolutionary age of the cues. However, they detected non-threatening evolutionary targets faster than non-evolutionary ones. We suggest that the underlying mechanism may be different: general feature detection can account for finding evolutionary threatening cues quickly, while specific features detection is more appropriate for modern threatening stimuli.