SELECTIVE ATTENTION TOWARD PHYSICAL THREAT IN PATIENTS WITH PANIC DISORDER

Recent research has indicated that panic disorder patients may exhibit a cognitive bias to attend selectively to stimuli that pertain to physical threat. The present study attempted to investigate this phenomenon using a direct assessment of attentive behaviour. Eighteen panic disorder patients and 18 control subjects were tested in a visual attention paradigm developed by MacLeod et al. This paradigm allowed for the assessment of the allocation of visual attention to words related either to physical or social threat, via the measurement of detection latencies for visual probes that appeared following presentations of specific threat cues. It was found that, compared to responses to social threat cues, patients had reduced detection latencies to probes presented when they were actively reading stimuli pertaining to physical threat. This effect was not observed among control subjects. These results are consistent with the view that panic patients maintain a cognitive set that biases attention towards the processing of physical threat.