@phdthesis{Rubo2019, author = {Rubo, Marius}, title = {Social Attention in the Laboratory, in Real Life and in Virtual Reality}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-18845}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-188452}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2019}, abstract = {Social attention is a ubiquitous, but also enigmatic and sometimes elusive phenomenon. We direct our gaze at other human beings to see what they are doing and to guess their intentions, but we may also absorb social events en passant as they unfold in the corner of the eye. We use our gaze as a discrete communication channel, sometimes conveying pieces of information which would be difficult to explicate, but we may also find ourselves avoiding eye-contact with others in moments when self-disclosure is fear-laden. We experience our gaze as the most genuine expression of our will, but research also suggests considerable levels of predictability and automaticity in our gaze behavior. The phenomenon's complexity has hindered researchers from developing a unified framework which can conclusively accommodate all of its aspects, or from even agreeing on the most promising research methodologies. The present work follows a multi-methods approach, taking on several aspects of the phenomenon from various directions. Participants in study 1 viewed dynamic social scenes on a computer screen. Here, low-level physical saliency (i.e. color, contrast, or motion) and human heads both attracted gaze to a similar extent, providing a comparison of two vastly different classes of gaze predictors in direct juxtaposition. In study 2, participants with varying degrees of social anxiety walked in a public train station while their eye movements were tracked. With increasing levels of social anxiety, participants showed a relative avoidance of gaze at near compared to distant people. When replicating the experiment in a laboratory situation with a matched participant group, social anxiety did not modulate gaze behavior, fueling the debate around appropriate experimental designs in the field. Study 3 employed virtual reality (VR) to investigate social gaze in a complex and immersive, but still highly controlled situation. In this situation, participants exhibited a gaze behavior which may be more typical for real-life compared to laboratory situations as they avoided gaze contact with a virtual conspecific unless she gazed at them. This study provided important insights into gaze behavior in virtual social situations, helping to better estimate the possible benefits of this new research approach. Throughout all three experiments, participants showed consistent inter-individual differences in their gaze behavior. However, the present work could not resolve if these differences are linked to psychologically meaningful traits or if they instead have an epiphenomenal character.}, subject = {Aufmerksamkeit}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Flechsenhar2019, author = {Flechsenhar, Aleya Felicia}, title = {The Ubiquity of Social Attention - a Detailed Investigation of the Underlying Mechanisms}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-18452}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-184528}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2019}, abstract = {This dissertation highlights various aspects of basic social attention by choosing versatile approaches to disentangle the precise mechanisms underlying the preference to focus on other human beings. The progressive examination of different social processes contrasted with aspects of previously adopted principles of general attention. Recent research investigating eye movements during free exploration revealed a clear and robust social bias, especially for the faces of depicted human beings in a naturalistic scene. However, free viewing implies a combination of mechanisms, namely automatic attention (bottom-up), goal-driven allocation (top-down), or contextual cues and inquires consideration of overt (open exploration using the eyes) as well as covert orienting (peripheral attention without eye movement). Within the scope of this dissertation, all of these aspects have been disentangled in three studies to provide a thorough investigation of different influences on social attention mechanisms. In the first study (section 2.1), we implemented top-down manipulations targeting non-social features in a social scene to test competing resources. Interestingly, attention towards social aspects prevailed, even though this was detrimental to completing the requirements. Furthermore, the tendency of this bias was evident for overall fixation patterns, as well as fixations occurring directly after stimulus onset, suggesting sustained as well as early preferential processing of social features. Although the introduction of tasks generally changes gaze patterns, our results imply only subtle variance when stimuli are social. Concluding, this experiment indicates that attention towards social aspects remains preferential even in light of top-down demands. The second study (section 2.2) comprised of two separate experiments, one in which we investigated reflexive covert attention and another in which we tested reflexive as well as sustained overt attention for images in which a human being was unilaterally located on either the left or right half of the scene. The first experiment consisted of a modified dot-probe paradigm, in which peripheral probes were presented either congruently on the side of the social aspect, or incongruently on the non-social side. This was based on the assumption that social features would act similar to cues in traditional spatial cueing paradigms, thereby facilitating reaction times for probes presented on the social half as opposed to the non-social half. Indeed, results reflected such congruency effect. The second experiment investigated these reflexive mechanisms by monitoring eye movements and specifying the location of saccades and fixations for short as well as long presentation times. Again, we found the majority of initial saccades to be congruently directed to the social side of the stimulus. Furthermore, we replicated findings for sustained attention processes with highest fixation densities for the head region of the displayed human being. The third study (section 2.3), tackled the other mechanism proposed in the attention dichotomy, the bottom-up influence. Specifically, we reduced the available contextual information of a scene by using a gaze-contingent display, in which only the currently fixated regions would be visible to the viewer, while the remaining image would remain masked. Thereby, participants had to voluntarily change their gaze in order to explore the stimulus. First, results revealed a replication of a social bias in free-viewing displays. Second, the preference to select social features was also evident in gaze-contingent displays. Third, we find higher recurrent gaze patterns for social images compared to non-social ones for both viewing modalities. Taken together, these findings imply a top-down driven preference for social features largely independent of contextual information. Importantly, for all experiments, we took saliency predictions of different computational algorithms into consideration to ensure that the observed social bias was not a result of high physical saliency within these areas. For our second experiment, we even reduced the stimulus set to those images, which yielded lower mean and peak saliency for the side of the stimulus containing the social information, while considering algorithms based on low-level features, as well as pre-trained high-level features incorporated in deep learning algorithms. Our experiments offer new insights into single attentional mechanisms with regard to static social naturalistic scenes and enable a further understanding of basic social processing, contrasting from that of non-social attention. The replicability and consistency of our findings across experiments speaks for a robust effect, attributing social attention an exceptional role within the general attention construct, not only behaviorally, but potentially also on a neuronal level and further allowing implications for clinical populations with impaired social functioning.}, subject = {Aufmerksamkeit}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Simons2020, author = {Simons, Bibiane Stephanie Elisabeth}, title = {Modulation von emotionaler Anspannung mittels transkranieller Gleichstromstimulation (tDCS) des rechten inferioren pr{\"a}frontalen Kortex}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-19928}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-199289}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Emotionale Kontrolle ist f{\"u}r unsere Zusammenleben unerl{\"a}sslich. Zum neuronalen Netzwerk der Emotionsverarbeitung und Emotionskontrolle geh{\"o}rt auch der rechte inferiore pr{\"a}frontale Kortex, wobei seine Funktion h{\"a}ufig mit der einer Bremse verglichen wird. Die Antizipationsangst, die bei manchen Angstst{\"o}rungen eine Rolle spielt und das daraus resultierende Vermeidungsverhalten, bieten einen relevanten Zusammenhang, den man in der Therapie von Angsterkrankungen beeinflussen k{\"o}nnte. Hierbei bieten nichtinvasive Hirnstimulationsverfahren einen m{\"o}glichen Ansatzpunkt und der rechte IFG ein m{\"o}gliches Ziel. In dieser Studie stimulierten wir den rechten inferioren frontalen Gyrus (rIFG) mittels anodaler transkranieller Gleichstromstimulation (tDCS) um zu pr{\"u}fen, ob dadurch die emotionale Anspannung moduliert werden kann. Zu diesem Zwecke wurde der rIFG bei gesunden Probanden (N = 80), aufgeteilt in eine tDCS Gruppe und eine Sham Gruppe, {\"u}ber einen Zeitraum von 20 Minuten mit einer Stromst{\"a}rke von 2 mA und einer Elektrodengr{\"o}ße von 35 cm² elektrisch stimuliert. W{\"a}hrenddessen wurde die Hautleitf{\"a}higkeiten (SCL) als psychophysiologischer Parameter in Antizipation eines akustischen neutralen bzw. aversiven Reizes gemessen. Die Art des akustischen Reizes war dabei f{\"u}r die Probanden durch einen visuellen Hinweisstimulus vorhersehbar, jedoch war der Zeitpunkt der Pr{\"a}sentation des akustischen Reizes nicht vorhersehbar. Dadurch konnte emotionale Anspannung in Antizipation des aversiven Stimulus induziert werden, was wir durch ein insgesamt h{\"o}heres SCL w{\"a}hrend der aversiven Bedingung nachweisen konnten. Wir konnten einen signifikanten Effekt der tDCS des rIFG auf die psychophysiologischen Parameter der Antizipationsangst nachweisen. Der Effekt beruhte dabei auf einem geringeren Anstieg des Hautleitf{\"a}higkeitslevels der tDCS Gruppe von neutraler zu aversiver Bedingung im Vergleich zu Sham Gruppe. Wir k{\"o}nnen daher best{\"a}tigen, dass es m{\"o}glich ist die physiologische Reaktion bei emotionaler Anspannung durch tDCS des rIFG zu regulieren. Dar{\"u}ber hinaus k{\"o}nnen wir dadurch die angenommene Rolle des rIFG in der Emotionsregulation best{\"a}tigen. Dieser scheint daher ein vielversprechender Stimulationsort f{\"u}r tDCS zur Verst{\"a}rkung der emotionalen Kontrolle zu sein. Auf Basis unserer Ergebnisse, k{\"o}nnte in zuk{\"u}nftigen Studien tDCS des rIFG in Kombination mit Verhaltenstherapie bei Angsterkrankungen oder zur Modulation von Vermeidungsverhalten eingesetzt werden. Durch unseren Versuch konnte damit ein grundlegender Beitrag f{\"u}r zuk{\"u}nftige Therapiestudien im Zusammenhang mit tDCS geleistet werden.}, language = {de} } @phdthesis{Ghafoor2020, author = {Ghafoor, Hina}, title = {Coping with Psychosocial Stress: Examining the Roles of Emotional Intelligence and Coping Strategies in Germany and Pakistan}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-19351}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-193519}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Maladaptive coping mechanisms influence health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of individuals facing acute and chronic stress. Trait emotional intelligence (EI) may provide a protective shield against the debilitating effects of maladaptive coping thus contributing to maintained HRQoL. Low trait EI, on the other hand, may predispose individuals to apply maladaptive coping, consequently resulting in lower HRQoL. The current research is comprised of two studies. Study 1 was designed to investigate the protective effects of trait EI and its utility for efficient coping in dealing with the stress caused by chronic heart failure (CHF) in a cross-cultural setting (Pakistan vs Germany). N = 200 CHF patients were recruited at cardiology institutes of Multan, Pakistan and W{\"u}rzburg as well as Brandenburg, Germany. Path analysis confirmed the expected relation between low trait EI and low HRQoL and revealed that this association was mediated by maladaptive metacognitions and negative coping strategies in Pakistani but not German CHF patients. Interestingly, also the specific coping strategies were culture-specific. The Pakistani sample considered religious coping to be highly important, whereas the German sample was focused on adopting a healthy lifestyle such as doing exercise. These findings are in line with cultural characteristics suggesting that German CHF patients have an internal locus of control as compared to an external locus of control in Pakistani CHF patients. Finally, the findings from study 1 corroborate the culture-independent validity of the metacognitive model of generalized anxiety disorder. In addition to low trait EI, high interoception accuracy (IA) may predispose individuals to interpret cardiac symptoms as threatening, thus leading to anxiety. To examine this proposition, Study 2 compared individuals with high vs low IA in dealing with a psychosocial stressor (public speaking) in an experimental lab study. In addition, a novel physiological intervention named transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (t-VNS) and cognitive reappraisal (CR) were applied during and after the anticipation of the speech in order to facilitate coping with stress. N= 99 healthy volunteers participated in the study. Results showed interesting descriptive results that only reached trend level. They suggested a tendency of high IA individuals to perceive the situation as more threatening as indicated by increased heart rate and reduced heart rate variability in the high-frequency spectrum as well as high subjective anxiety during anticipation of and actual performance of the speech. This suggests a potential vulnerability of high IA individuals for developing anxiety disorders, specifically social anxiety disorder, in case negative self-focused attention and negative evaluation is applied to the (more prominently perceived) increased cardiac responding during anticipation of and the actual presentation of the public speech. The study did not reveal any significant protective effects of t-VNS and CR. In summary, the current research suggested that low trait EI and high IA predicted worse psychological adjustment to chronic and acute distress. Low trait EI facilitated maladaptive metacognitive processes resulting in the use of negative coping strategies in Study 1; however, increased IA regarding cardioceptions predicted high physiological arousal in study 2. Finally, the German vs. the Pakistani culture greatly affected the preference for specific coping strategies. These findings have implications for caregivers to provide culture-specific treatments on the one hand. On the other hand, they highlight high IA as a possible vulnerability to be targeted for the prevention of (social) anxiety.}, subject = {Deutschland}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{LangeneSoehnchen2020, author = {Lange [n{\´e} S{\"o}hnchen], Bastian}, title = {Influence of social anxiety on social attention and corresponding changes in action patterns}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-18900}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-189001}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2020}, abstract = {People who suffer Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) are under substantial personal distress and endure impaired normal functioning in at least some parts of everyday life. Next, to the personal suffering, there are also the immense public health costs to consider, as SAD is the most common anxiety disorder and thereby one of the major psychiatric disorders in general. Over the last years, fundamental research found cognitive factors as essential components in the development and maintenance of social fears. Following leading cognitive models, avoidance behaviors are thought to be an important factor in maintaining the developed social anxieties. Therefore, this thesis aims to deepen the knowledge of avoidance behaviors exhibited in social anxiety, which allows to get a better understanding of how SAD is maintained. To reach this goal three studies were conducted, each using a different research approach. In the first study cutting-edge Virtual Reality (VR) equipment was used to immerse participants in a virtual environment. In this virtual setting, High Socially Anxious (HSA) individuals and matched controls had to execute a social Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT). In the task, participants had to pass a virtual person displaying neutral or angry facial expressions. By using a highly immersive VR apparatus, the first described study took the initial step in establishing a new VR task for the implicit research on social approach-avoidance behaviors. By moving freely through a VR environment, participants experienced near real-life social situations. By tracking body and head movements, physical and attentional approach-avoidance processes were studied. The second study looked at differences in attention shifts initiated by gaze-cues of neutral or emotional faces. Comparing HSA and controls, enabled a closer look at attention re-allocation with special focus on social stimuli. Further, context conditioning was used to compare task performance in a safe and in a threatening environment. Next to behavioral performance, the study also investigated neural activity using Electroencephalography (EEG) primarily looking at the N2pc component. In the third study, eye movements of HSA and Low Socially Anxious (LSA) were analyzed using an eye-tracking apparatus while participants executed a computer task. The participants' tasks consisted of the detection of either social or non-social stimuli in complex visual settings. The study intended to compare attention shifts towards social components between these two tasks and how high levels of social anxiety influence them. In other words, the measurements of eye movements enabled the investigation to what extent social attention is task-dependent and how it is influenced by social anxiety. With the three described studies, three different approaches were used to get an in-depth understanding of what avoidance behaviors in SAD are and to which extent they are exhibited. Overall, the results showed that HSA individuals exhibited exaggerated physical and attentional avoidance behavior. Furthermore, the results highlighted that the task profoundly influences attention allocation. Finally, all evidence indicates that avoidance behaviors in SAD are exceedingly complex. They are not merely based on the fear of a particular stimulus, but rather involve highly compound cognitive processes, which surpass the simple avoidance of threatening stimuli. To conclude, it is essential that further research is conducted with special focus on SAD, its maintaining factors, and the influence of the chosen research task and method.}, subject = {Sozialangst}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Foerster2020, author = {F{\"o}rster, Anna}, title = {Searching for truth in dishonesty: The cognitive architecture of lying}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-20973}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-209730}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Honest actions predominate human behavior. From time to time, this general preference must yield to dishonest actions, which require an effortful process of overcoming initial honest response activation. This thesis presents three experimental series to elucidate this tug-of-war between honest and dishonest response tendencies in overtly committed instances of lies, thereby joining recent efforts to move from a sheer phenomenological perspective on dishonest responding as being more difficult than honest responding to a precise description of the underlying cognitive processes. The consideration of cognitive theories, empirical evidence, and paradigms from different research fields - dishonesty, cognitive control and sensorimotor stage models of information processing - lay the groundwork for the research questions and methodological approach of this thesis. The experiments pinpoint the underlying conflict of dishonest responding in the central, capacity-limited stage of information processing (Experiments 1 to 4), but they also demonstrate that cognitive control processes (Experiments 5 to 7) and the internalization of false alibis (Experiments 8 to 11) can reduce or even completely eliminate this conflict. The data reveals great flexibility at the cognitive basis of dishonest responding: On the one hand, dishonest responding appears to rely heavily on capacity-limited processes of response selection to overcome honest response tendencies alongside up- and downstream consequences of response activation and monitoring. On the other hand, agents have powerful tools to mitigate these effortful processes through control adaptation and false alibis. These results support and expand current theorizing of the cognitive underpinnings of dishonest responding. Furthermore, they are alerting from an applied perspective on the detection of lies, especially when considering the flexibility of even basic cognitive processes in the face of false alibis. A promising way to move forward from here would be a fine-grained discrimination of response activation, passive decay and active inhibition of honest representations in dishonest responding and the assessment of the adaptiveness of these processes.}, subject = {L{\"u}ge}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Roesler2020, author = {R{\"o}sler, Lara}, title = {Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms of Social Attention}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-21609}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-216092}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Humans in our environment are of special importance to us. Even if our minds are fixated on tasks unrelated to their presence, our attention will likely be drawn towards other people's appearances and their actions. While we might remain unaware of this attentional bias at times, various studies have demonstrated the preferred visual scanning of other humans by recording eye movements in laboratory settings. The present thesis aims to investigate the circumstances under and the mechanisms by which this so-called social attention operates. The first study demonstrates that social features in complex naturalistic scenes are prioritized in an automatic fashion. After 200 milliseconds of stimulus presentation, which is too brief for top-down processing to intervene, participants targeted image areas depicting humans significantly more often than would be expected from a chance distribution of saccades. Additionally, saccades towards these areas occurred earlier in time than saccades towards non-social image regions. In the second study, we show that human features receive most fixations even when bottom-up information is restricted; that is, even when only the fixated region was visible and the remaining parts of the image masked, participants still fixated on social image regions longer than on regions without social cues. The third study compares the influence of real and artificial faces on gaze patterns during the observation of dynamic naturalistic videos. Here we find that artificial faces, belonging to humanlike statues or machines, significantly predicted gaze allocation but to a lesser extent than real faces. In the fourth study, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural correlates of reflexive social attention. Analyses of the evoked blood-oxygenation level dependent responses pointed to an involvement of striate and extrastriate visual cortices in the encoding of social feature space. Collectively, these studies help to elucidate under which circumstances social features are prioritized in a laboratory setting and how this prioritization might be achieved on a neuronal level. The final experimental chapter addresses the question whether these laboratory findings can be generalized to the real world. In this study, participants were introduced to a waiting room scenario in which they interacted with a confederate. Eye movement analyses revealed that gaze behavior heavily depended on the social context and were influenced by whether an interaction is currently desired. We further did not find any evidence for altered gaze behavior in socially anxious participants. Alleged gaze avoidance or hypervigilance in social anxiety might thus represent a laboratory phenomenon that occurs only under very specific real-life conditions. Altogether the experiments described in the present thesis thus refine our understanding of social attention and simultaneously challenge the inferences we can draw from laboratory research.}, subject = {Aufmerksamkeit}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{RiechelmannverhSteinbacher2021, author = {Riechelmann [verh. Steinbacher], Eva Katharina}, title = {Gaze interaction: Cognitive mechanisms of oculomotor action control}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-21527}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-215279}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Humans use their eyes not only as visual input devices to perceive the environment, but also as an action tool in order to generate intended effects in their environment. For instance, glances are used to direct someone else's attention to a place of interest, indicating that gaze control is an important part of social communication. Previous research on gaze control in a social context mainly focused on the gaze recipient by asking how humans respond to perceived gaze (gaze cueing). So far, this perspective has hardly considered the actor's point of view by neglecting to investigate what mental processes are involved when actors decide to perform an eye movement to trigger a gaze response in another person. Furthermore, eye movements are also used to affect the non-social environment, for instance when unlocking the smartphone with the help of the eyes. This and other observations demonstrate the necessity to consider gaze control in contexts other than social communication whilst at the same time focusing on commonalities and differences inherent to the nature of a social (vs. non-social) action context. Thus, the present work explores the cognitive mechanisms that control such goal-oriented eye movements in both social and non-social contexts. The experiments presented throughout this work are built on pre-established paradigms from both the oculomotor research domain and from basic cognitive psychology. These paradigms are based on the principle of ideomotor action control, which provides an explanatory framework for understanding how goal-oriented, intentional actions come into being. The ideomotor idea suggests that humans acquire associations between their actions and the resulting effects, which can be accessed in a bi-directional manner: Actions can trigger anticipations of their effects, but the anticipated resulting effects can also trigger the associated actions. According to ideomotor theory, action generation involves the mental anticipation of the intended effect (i.e., the action goal) to activate the associated motor pattern. The present experiments involve situations where participants control the gaze of a virtual face via their eye movements. The triggered gaze responses of the virtual face are consistent to the participant's eye movements, representing visual action effects. Experimental situations are varied with respect to determinants of action-effect learning (e.g., contingency, contiguity, action mode during acquisition) in order to unravel the underlying dynamics of oculomotor control in these situations. In addition to faces, conditions involving changes in non-social objects were included to address the question of whether mechanisms underlying gaze control differ for social versus non-social context situations. The results of the present work can be summarized into three major findings. 1. My data suggest that humans indeed acquire bi-directional associations between their eye movements and the subsequently perceived gaze response of another person, which in turn affect oculomotor action control via the anticipation of the intended effects. The observed results show for the first time that eye movements in a gaze-interaction scenario are represented in terms of their gaze response in others. This observation is in line with the ideomotor theory of action control. 2. The present series of experiments confirms and extends pioneering results of Huestegge and Kreutzfeldt (2012) with respect to the significant influence of action effects in gaze control. I have shown that the results of Huestegge and Kreutzfeldt (2012) can be replicated across different contexts with different stimulus material given that the perceived action effects were sufficiently salient. 3. Furthermore, I could show that mechanisms of gaze control in a social gaze-interaction context do not appear to be qualitatively different from those in a non-social context. All in all, the results support recent theoretical claims emphasizing the role of anticipation-based action control in social interaction. Moreover, my results suggest that anticipation-based gaze control in a social context is based on the same general psychological mechanisms as ideomotor gaze control, and thus should be considered as an integral part rather than as a special form of ideomotor gaze control.}, subject = {Verhaltenskontrolle}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Stegmann2021, author = {Stegmann, Yannik}, title = {Electrocortical mechanisms of sustained attention during the acquisition and interaction of conditioned fear and anxiety}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-23770}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-237700}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Adapting defensive behavior to the characteristics of a threatening situation is a fundamental function of the brain. Particularly, threat imminence plays a major role for the organization of defensive responses. Acute threat prompts phasic physiological responses, which are usually associated with an intense feeling of fear. In contrast, diffuse and potentially threatening situations elicit a sustained state of anxious apprehension. Detection of the threatening stimulus defines the key event in this framework, initiating the transition from potential to acute threat. Consequently, attention to threat is crucial for supporting defensive behavior. The functions of attention are finely tuned to the characteristics of a threatening situation. Potential threat is associated with hypervigilance, in order to facilitate threat detection. Once a threatening stimulus has been identified, attention is selectively focused on the source of danger. Even though the concepts of selective attention and hypervigilance to threat are well established, evidence for their neural correlates remain scarce. Therefore, a major goal of this thesis is to elucidate the neural correlates of selective attention to acute threat and hypervigilance during potential threat. A second aim of this thesis is to provide a mechanistic account for the interaction of fear and anxiety. While contemporary models view fear and anxiety as mutually exclusive, recent findings for the neural networks of fear and anxiety suggest potential interactions. In four studies, aversive cue conditioning was used to induce acute threat, while context conditioning served as a laboratory model of potential threat. To quantify neural correlates of selective attention and hypervigilance, steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) were measured as an index of visuocortical responding. Study 1 compared visuocortical responses to acute and potential threat for high versus low trait-anxious individuals. All individuals demonstrated enhanced electrocortical responses to the central cue in the acute threat condition, suggesting evidence for the neural correlate of selective attention. However, only low anxious individuals revealed facilitated processing of the contexts in the potential threat condition, reflecting a neural correlate of hypervigilance. High anxious individuals did not discriminate among contexts. These findings contribute to the notion of aberrational processing of potential threat for high anxious individuals. Study 2 and 3 realized orthogonal combinations of cue and context conditioning to investigate potential interactions of fear and anxiety. In contrast to Study 1 and 2, Study 3 used verbal instructions to induce potentially threatening contexts. Besides ssVEPs, threat ratings and skin conductance responses (SCRs) were recorded as efferent indices of defensive responding. None of these studies found further evidence for the neural correlates of hypervigilance and selective attention. However, results for ratings and SCRs revealed additive effects of fear and anxiety, suggesting that fear and anxiety are not mutually exclusive, but interact linearly to organize and facilitate defensive behavior. Study 4 tested ssVEPs to more ecologically valid forms of context conditioning, using flickering video stimuli of virtual offices to establish context representations. Contrary to expectations, results revealed decreased visuocortical responses during sustained presentations of anxiety compared to neutral contexts. A disruption of ssVEP signals eventually suggests interferences by continuously changing video streams which are enhanced as a function of motivational relevance. In summary, this thesis provided evidence for the neural correlates of attention only for isolated forms of fear and anxiety, but not for their interaction. In contrast, an additive interaction model of fear and anxiety for measures of defensive responding offers a new perspective on the topography of defensive behavior.}, subject = {Furcht}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Vietz2022, author = {Vietz, Melanie Sabrina}, title = {Pr{\"a}vention von Angsterkrankungen: Etablierung und Validierung des Kognitiven Angstsensitivit{\"a}tstrainings (KAST) - Deutsche Version}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-22312}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-223122}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2022}, abstract = {Angsterkrankungen stellen mit einer 12-Monats-Pr{\"a}valenz von 14\% die h{\"a}ufigsten psychischen Erkrankungen in der westlichen Gesellschaft dar. Angesichts der hohen querschnittlichen wie sequentiellen Komorbidit{\"a}t von Angsterkrankungen, der ausgepr{\"a}gten individuellen Einschr{\"a}nkungen sowie der hohen {\"o}konomischen Belastung f{\"u}r das Gesundheitssystem ist neben therapeutischen Behandlungsans{\"a}tzen die Entwicklung von kurzzeitigen, kosteng{\"u}nstigen und leicht zug{\"a}nglichen Pr{\"a}ventionsmaßnahmen von großer Bedeutung und steht zunehmend im Fokus des gesundheitspolitischen Interesses, um die Inzidenz von Angsterkrankungen zu reduzieren. Voraussetzung f{\"u}r die Entwicklung von gezielten und damit den effektivsten Pr{\"a}ventionsmaßnahmen sind valide Risikofaktoren, die die Entstehung von Angsterkrankungen beg{\"u}nstigen. Ein Konstrukt, das in der Literatur als subklinisches Symptom in Form einer kognitiven Vulnerabilit{\"a}t f{\"u}r Angsterkrankungen und damit als Risikofaktor angesehen wird, ist die sogenannte Angstsensitivit{\"a}t (AS). AS umfasst die individuelle Tendenz, angstbezogene k{\"o}rperliche Symptome generell als bedrohlich einzustufen und mit aversiven Konsequenzen zu assoziieren. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit war daher die Etablierung und Validierung eines Pr{\"a}ventionsprogramms zur Reduktion der AS an einer nicht-klinischen Stichprobe von 100 Probanden (18-30 Jahre) mit einer erh{\"o}hten AS (Anxiety Sensitivity Index [ASI-3] ≥17) sowie die Rekrutierung von 100 alters- und geschlechtsangeglichenen Probanden mit niedriger Angstsensitivit{\"a}t (ASI-3 <17). In einem randomisiert-kontrollierten Studiendesign durchliefen die Probanden mit hoher AS entweder das {\"u}ber f{\"u}nf Wochen angelegte „Kognitive Angstsensitivit{\"a}tstraining" (KAST) als erste deutschsprachige {\"U}bersetzung des Computer-basierten „Cognitive Anxiety Sensitivity Treatment" (CAST) von Schmidt et al. (2014) oder wurden der Wartelisten-Kontrollgruppe zugeteilt. Das KAST Training bestand aus einer einmaligen Vermittlung kognitiv-behavioraler Psychoedukation zum Thema Stress und Anspannung sowie deren Auswirkungen auf den K{\"o}rper und der Anleitung von zwei interozeptiven Expositions{\"u}bungen (‚Strohhalm-Atmung' und ‚Hyperventilation'), die {\"u}ber den anschließenden Zeitraum von f{\"u}nf Wochen in Form von Hausaufgaben wiederholt wurden. Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass die Teilnehmer des KAST-Programms nach Beendigung des Trainings (T1) eine signifikant niedrigere AS-Auspr{\"a}gung im Vergleich zur Wartelisten-Kontrollgruppe aufwiesen und diese Reduktion auch {\"u}ber den Katamnese-Zeitraum von sechs Monaten (T2) stabil blieb. Erg{\"a}nzend wurde auch die Targetierbarkeit weiterer intermedi{\"a}rer Risikomarker wie der Trennungsangst (TA), des Index der kardialen Sensitivit{\"a}t sowie der Herzratenvariabilit{\"a}t (HRV) untersucht, die jedoch nicht durch das KAST-Training direkt ver{\"a}ndert werden konnten. Im Vergleich der Subgruppen von Probanden mit hoher AS und gleichzeitig hoher TA (Adult Separation Anxiety Questionnaire [ASA-27] ≥22) und Probanden mit hoher AS, aber niedriger TA (ASA-27 <22) zeigte sich, dass die AS-TA-Hochrisikogruppe ebenfalls gut von der KAST-Intervention profitieren und eine signifikante Reduktion der AS erzielen konnte, indem sie sich bei T1 dem Niveau der Gruppe mit niedriger TA anglich. Zudem korrelierte die prozentuale Ver{\"a}nderung der Einstiegswerte der inneren Anspannung w{\"a}hrend der Strohhalm-Atmungs{\"u}bung positiv mit der prozentualen Ver{\"a}nderung der dimensionalen TA bei T1. Zusammenfassend weisen die Ergebnisse der vorliegenden Arbeit erstmalig auf die Wirksamkeit der deutschsprachigen {\"U}bersetzung des CAST-Programms (Schmidt et al., 2014), eines Computer-basierten, und damit leicht zu implementierenden sowie kosteng{\"u}nstigen Programms, in Bezug auf die Reduktion der AS sowie indirekt der TA hin und k{\"o}nnen damit zur indizierten und demnach besonders effektiven Pr{\"a}vention von Angsterkrankungen in Hochrisikogruppen beitragen.}, subject = {Angstst{\"o}rung}, language = {de} }