Date of Award

10-2023

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Psychological Science

Program

Psychological Science (MS)

First Advisor/Chairperson

Josh Carlson

Abstract

Threat detection, the process of searching complex environments for harmful stimuli, represents a vastly important job that promotes the biological fitness of the organism. Decades of experimental evidence suggests individuals either diagnosed, or at risk for, affective disorders display altered patterns of attentional engagement (hypervigilance or maintenance) with external stimuli; referred to as attentional biases. To date, the extent to which underlying neural mechanisms drive attentional biases, both in affective disorders as well as unselected populations, remain to be resolved. Thus, using eye-tracking and a passive emotional free viewing task, this study set to clarify resting-state network contributions from three large scale brain networks: frontoparietal, default mode, and salience networks. Results indicate participants displayed significant biases to negative/threat stimuli, and these attentional biases toward threat were associated with positive and negative connectivity between nodes within the three networks. Notably these were the lateral parietal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, lateral prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, amygdala, and superior frontal gyrus. Attentional biases to negative/threat were not associated with stress, anxious, or depressive symptomatology measured by self-report. Lastly, eye-movement measures were found to be largely reliable, in contrast to those derived from response time indices. Main implications from the study suggest eye-movement measures should be further adopted due to their superior psychometric reliability, and further studies should target these brain structures for further analysis of their contributions to these biases.

Access Type

Open Access

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