Phenotypes of pathological attention during fear and anxiety

• Applicant: Dr. Mario Reutter
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548261998

Anxiety disorders greatly contribute to the global psychological burden and are accompanied by alterations of attention. Yet, we are still unable to assess the individual extent of attentional biases reliably, which would be mandatory for the development and evaluation of psychotherapeutic applications. Thus, in this project, we plan to determine optimal boundary conditions that enable us to measure attentional biases precisely and relate them to anxiety disorders. To this end, we utilize a multimodal approach including techniques to measure eye movements, neuroelectric activity, and autonomic reactions such as cardiac and electrodermal responses. These methods are employed in experimental paradigms that enable measurement of distinct mechanisms during information processing by a differentiation of sequential attentional stages. In work package A, we investigate the anticipation of and the search for potential threat. Work package B, in turn, focuses on the competition for resources of selective attention during and after the processing of threat-relevant stimuli. To achieve this, we benefit from a combination of eye-tracking and electroencephalography to distinguish between the influence of attentional processes with and without eye movements on classical indices of biased attention. In all experiments, we capitalize on new methodological developments to systematically identify preferable boundary conditions and transfer them to future studies (so-called multiverse and specification curve analyses). We will evaluate our results in a final experiment, which applies the insights of our previous investigations to an independent sample and thereby tests their generalizability. A success of this endeavor would pave the way for follow-up projects involving clinical intervention studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Netherlands
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Matthias Gamer; Professor Dr. Johannes Hewig
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Matthias J. Wieser