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63 Cohen, P.R. and Levesque, H.J. (1991) Teamwork Nous, 25, 487-512

64 Singh, M. (1994) Multiagent Systems: a Theoretical Framework for intentions, Know-How and Communications, Springer-Verlag
65 Grosz, B. and Kraus, S. (1996) Collaborative plans for complex group

73 Sen, S. (1996) Adaptation, co-evolution and learning in multiagent systems SS-96-01, 1996 AIII Spring Symposium 74 Sen, S. (1997) Multiagent learning Technical Report WS-97, AIII-97 Workshop 75 Weiss, G. (1993) Learning to coordinate actions in multiagent systems, in Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Bajcsy, R., ed.), pp. 311-316, Morgan Kaufmann 76 Weiss, G. and Sen, S. (1996) Adaptation and Learning in Multiagent Systems: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer-Verlag 77 Chaib-draa, B. (1995) Industrial applications Communications of the ACM 38, 49-53 of distributed AI

action Artif. Intell. 86, 269-357

66 Rao, A.S. and Georgeff, M.P. (1995) BDI agents: from theory to practice,

in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multiagent Systems, pp. 312-319, MIT Press 67 Sen, S. (1996) Reciprocity: a foundational principle for promoting cooperative behaviour among self-interested agents, in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems, pp. 315-321, MIT Press 68 Shehory, O. and Kraus, S. (1995) Task allocation via coalition formation among autonomous agents, in Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence pp. 655-661, Morgan Kaufmann (Mellish, .S., ed.),

78 Jennings, N.R. (1994) Cooperation in Industrial Multiagent Systems (World Scientific Series in Computer Science Vol. 43), John Wiley & Sons 79 Van-Dyke Parunak, H. (1994) Applications intelligence in industry, in Foundations of distributed artificial of Distributed Artificial

69 Shehory, O. and Kraus, S. (1996) A kernel-oriented model for coalition

Intelligence (O'Hare, G.M.P. and Jennings, N., eds), pp. 139-164, Wiley Inter-Science 80 Singh, M.P. et al. (1997)The Camot heterogeneous database project: implemented applications Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal 5, 207-225 81 Finin, T. et al. (1994) KQML as an agent communication language, in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (Adam, N.R. etaL, eds), pp. 456-463, ACM Press 82 O'Hare, G.M.P. and Jennings, N.R., eds (1994) Foundations Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Wiley Inter-Science of

formation in general environments: implementation and results, in Proceedings of the 13th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 133-140, AAAI Press/MIT Press 70 Zlotkin, G. and Rosenschein, J.S. (1994) Coalition, cryptography and stability: mechanisms for coalition formation in task-oriented domains, in Proceedings of the 12th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 432-437, AAAI PressdMITPress 71 Haynes, T. and Sen, S. (1996) Evolving behavioral strategies in predators and prey, in Adaptation and Learning in Multiagent Systems: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (Weiss, G. and Sen, S., eds), pp. 113-126, Springer-Verlag 72 Sen, S., Sekaran, M. and Hale, J. (1994) Learning to coordinate without sharing information, in Proceedings of the 12th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 426-431, AAAI Press/MIT Press

83 Durfee, E.H., Kiskis, D.L and Birmingham, W.P. (1997) The agent architecture of the University of Michigan digital library IEEEIBritish Computer Society Proceedings on Software Engineering 144, 61-71 84 Woolridge, M.J. and Jennings, N.R., eds (1995) Intelligent Agents: ECAI-94 Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, Springer-Verlag

Cognitive biases in
a n x i e t y and a t t e n t i o n to threat
Andrew Mathews, Bundy Mackintosh and Eamon P. Fulcher
The existence o f cognitive biases in anxiety is nol evidence ~ s t r a t i n g attentional vigilance to pessimistic interpretation of ambiguous items and an increased perception o f likelihood of occurrence of negative events. We explore h o w these reactions can be understood within an evolutionary context, and present a descriptive model consistent with the experimental findings, conducive to modification of responses through ~ming. A computational implementation of aspects of the model successfully pursuing the causal nature of biases in anxiety and examining the through training techniques. s i m u l m s changes in reaction time for a simple task as anxiety levels increase. diredions i n d ~ potential for ~ n g e

F o r most people worry and anxiety is a familiar if unwelcome experience. Thoughts about feared disasters intrude constantly into awareness, concentration on almost any task becomes difficult if not impossible, and we become more or less incapable of diverting attention away from the topic

of concern. For an unlucky but significant minority, this state of affairs is sufficiently severe that it handicaps their ability to cope effectively with everyday living. What can be the function of such an apparently maladaptive set of responses?
PIl: S1364-6613(97)01092-9 1997

Copyright 1997, Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 1364-6613/97/$17.00 Trends in C o g n i t i v e Sciences - Vol. 1, No. 9, December

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Evolutionary function of attention to threat In general, it is accepted that the pattern of physiological responses associated with fear has evolved to favour fight or rapid escape (or freezing) as a means of confronting or evading predators. To take one obvious example, fear is associated typically with increased blood flow to the striate musculature, in preference to parts of the body not essential to the avoidance of danger. Perhaps less familiar, however, is the idea that parallel changes in priority, serving a related evolutionary function, operate in the cognitive system of the human brain. The most obvious cognitive adaptation is the rapid detection of cues signalling danger. Perceptual cues associated with threat need to be identified rapidly, and attended to vigilantly: processing of other less critical attributes are of secondary importance. In the case of uncertain or ambiguous cues, priority needs to be given to anything that is a potential threat, even if it may have other possible interpretations: the cost of a miss is much greater than that of a false alarm. Thus, processing of information that is less vital, but which may compete for limited cognitive resources, may actively need to be inhibited. Although many of the circumstances that elicit human anxiety (including the mental process termed worry) differ dearly from those provoking fear of a predator, they appear to activate the same underlying mechanisms. Higher-level cognitive functions allow fear and anxiety to be aroused by much more complex cues, such as the imaginary anticipation of events. We see no reason to suppose, however, that the priorities imposed on the cognitive system by anxiety should differ fundamentally from those that have evolved as part of the fear response. Consequently, we might expect that elevated anxiety would be associated with preferential attention to cues associated with threat. Because people vary greatly in their tendency to become anxious, attentional vigilance should be easier to elicit in some individuals than in others. Evidence for selective attention to threat in anxiety states Together with other researchers, we have established that patients suffering from anxiety disorders, and to a lesser extent, normal individuals who score highly on measures of trait-anxiety, do attend selectively to threat cues. One of the methods used most commonly is based on the Stroop task, which requires naming the colour that words are written in. When these words have a threatening or unpleasant meaning (for example, disease, assault or failure), as opposed to being neutral (for example, curtains or washing), patients with Generalised Anxiety Disorder (who are characterized by excessive worry about many topics) are slower to name the colour of the word 1. These emotional interference effects are much less evident in non-anxious individuals, and are believed to arise because anxiety leads to greater difficulty in preventing attentional resources being captured by task-irrelevant cues related to threat. Similar effects are seen when searching among distractor items for a neutral target word: anxious patients, but not normal controls, are slowed more if the distractors are threatening in content 2'3. If the to-be-located target itself is threatening, however, such as an angry face among a large set of neutral faces, then anxious individuals detect it more

1000ms

500ms Display sequence

until response initiated

Fig. 1 Attentional probe task. The latency to respond to the probe, by indicating the direction of the arrow, is used as an index of attention to the picture in the location now occupied by the probe.

rapidly 4. Speeding is also seen when the target itself is neutral, but replaces one of two distractor words, one with a threatening meaning and the other without. Thus, anxious patients respond faster to probes replacing threatening rather than non-threatening items 5'6. Recently, we have found very similar effects using emotional pictures rather than words (J. Yiend and A. Mathews, unpublished). All these results are consistent with the idea that threatening cues capture attention more readily in anxious than nonanxious individuals (see Fig. 1).
What factors influence attention to threat? Research in our own and other laboratories has revealed a number of factors that determine the strength of this attentional vigilance effect. It is influenced strongly by the match between the emotional preoccupation of the individual and the type of material displayed. Thus, for instance, those whose worries relate to physical illness are most attentive to stimuli that are closely related to disease, while socially anxious individuals are more attentive to social threats 7. In normal individuals, positively valenced cues can capture attention if they are related to emotional interests 8. Analogous responses to positive items in anxious patients seem rare and may be confined to cues that, although positive on the surface, are so closely related to the content of their worries that they invoke negative connotations; for example, 'health' may bring preoccupation about illness to mind, or 'success' may seem painfully unattainable when failure seems imminent 9. The processes leading up to attentional capture do not depend necessarily on conscious evaluation of the stimulus. There are now numerous demonstrations of both interference and facilitation effects due to emotional stimuli of which individuals remain unaware (for example, stimuli presented for only 15 ms and followed immediately by a visual mask that prevents awarenessl-12). Similarly, masked pictures of feared stimuli (such as snakes) elicit larger skin

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conductance responses in individuals who display a phobia for such items than in those who do not u. Although, clearly, there is some relationship between severity of anxiety and attention to threat, the exact form of the relationship is still a subject of debate. Attentional vigilance is not related linearly to the degree of anxiety, but increases exponentially at very high levels of anxiety14. Transient induction of anxiety, about test failure in a laboratory setting, can induce attention to stimuli related to personal incompetence15, but under real-life examination stress, attentional vigilance is most marked in those who are prone to chronic anxiety. High trait-anxious students become more attentive to examination-threat cues as the examination approaches, while low trait-anxious students do not 16. Thus, vigilance may be an interactive function of chronic predisposition and the current level of threat. These and other related results suggest the following conclusions. Usually, fear-related or stressful events will provoke attentional vigilance directed towards threat-relevant cues. As discussed earlier, this arises from the evolutionary function of fear/anxiety in prioritizing the detection of potential dangers. However, many stimuli are related only indirectly to the threat (such as words, pictures, thoughts and images) and do not, in themselves, pose any real or immediate danger. That these have attention-capturing properties, even when they are presented below the threshold for awareness, suggests the existence of an automatic evaluative mechanism that registers all emotionally significant cues. We propose that proneness to anxiety relates to the threshold for triggering an interrupt signal, and to the strength of output from the evaluating mechanism. Thus, high anxiety individuals may register more frequent, rapid and intense evaluations that require attentional vigilance, while for less anxious individuals, attention to on-going tasks will continue without interruption. This hypothesis can be extended easily to describe the distinction between normal anxiety and clinical anxiety disorders. Because interrupt signals will be generated less frequently in non-anxious individuals, little effort is involved in dealing with threats that intrude into awareness. In vulnerable individuals, on the other hand, such intrusions will be relatively frequent and disruptive, and will lead to greater awareness of threat-related information. Furthermore, effort will need to be expended to return attention, repeatedly, to the task in hand. Under stress, intrusions will increase, requiring more and more effort. Such effortful suppression calls on limited cognitive resources which, therefore, will become exhausted at some point, and attentional control, or control over the contents of consciousness, will no longer be maintained. This limit we take to correspond to the onset of an anxiety disorder. Cognitive models of attention to emotional stimuli Giving attentional priority to emotional stimuli cannot be unique to anxious individuals. A great deal of research shows a ubiquitous tendency for us to attend to both positively and negatively valenced stimuli in preference to neutral ones 17 19. This is hardly surprising: positive emotional stimuli include those that have crucial implications for our basic needs, and negative stimuli are typically associated

with threats to our safety or well-being. Surely, such selective attention to stimuli important to survival must have emerged very early in our evolutionary history, suggesting that it is built into the nervous system at a basic level. In common with neuropsychological researchers 2,2~, we assume that early in the information processing sequence incoming stimuli are evaluated for their affective significance, prior to a full (or conscious) representation becoming available. A large body of animal research suggests that the amygdala complex is a likely site for the evaluation and/or storage of information about emotional significance21 and, recently, computational models based on this neuroanatomical work have been proposed 22. Furthermore, both the septo-hippocampal area (Gray's 'Behavioural Inhibition System'), and the amygdala, may be involved in the modulation of attention to significant emotional stimuli2'23. We outline here a very simple descriptive model, based on cognitive research concerning attention to emotional stimuli (see Fig. 2 for examples). The model is compatible with the neuroanatomical research outlined above and can also be implemented in connectionist terms (Box 1). When performing tasks involving only one stimulus or meaning, the emotional valence of the stimulus has not in itself led to observable performance differences among subjects who vary in their anxiety level24. Those cognitive tasks that have revealed differences between high versus low anxious individuals involve selection among more than one stimulus or stimulus attribute (or interpretation) where some have emotionally threatening and others have neutral meanings. Thus, an appropriate model needs to consider attentional tasks such as Stroop colour-naming, or the search for a target in the presence of distracting flankers. The important feature here is competition between attributes that are task-related, yet emotionally neutral, and those that are emotionally threatening but task-irrelevant. In these circumstances, responding to the target stimulus (or stimulus attribute) requires ignoring simultaneously presented threatening distractors. We assume that, initially, stimuli are processed in parallel, up to a point at which an initial perceptual representation of each is active (see Fig. 2). While representations are being processed further, the initial perceptual information is already being evaluated for emotional significance in a separate module. When a match is found with pre-existing emotional representations, this module provides output that boosts the activity of the corresponding perceptual representation. Initially matching emotional representations would be biologically prepared (such as loud noise, sudden movements or height). However, the contents of the evaluative mechanism will be updated constantly, as the system adapts to new information. In such a way, matches will occur for events that were neutral originally but which have gained emotional significance by association with strongly evaluated items, or have acquired affect via higher-level processes (such as imagery). The increased output to the related perceptual representation then allows it to compete more effectively for attention. Mutual inhibition is assumed to operate when overlapping or limited resources lead representations to become rivals for further processing. Thus, a powerful emotional distractor may interfere with executing responses required by the task.

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In order to perform tasks involving competition for resources, controlled effort must be directed at selecting the target stimulus. In common with others, we suppose that this effort has the effect of increasing activation of the representation of the target, and in so doing, inhibiting that of the competing emotional distractor. Individuals monitor their performance consciously, so that if noticeable interference occurs, controlled effort can be increased until interference is over-ridden (see Fig. 2A). A final assumption is that anxiety has the effect of increasing the output of the emotional evaluation system for threatening stimuli. This may happen in several ways. Firstly, there may be more matching representations in the affective evaluation system of anxiety-prone individuals; either because they have encountered more threatening events or have been more reactive to them. Secondly, a current anxious state may prime matching representations directly, or reduce the threshold for their activation. In any event, we suppose that these effects would lead to greater activation of the corresponding perceptual representations of threat-related distractors, thereby requiring more controlled effort to inhibit them. In a typical laboratory task, such as the emotional Stroop, the threatening distractors will vary in emotionality so that effort may have to be adjusted constantly to compensate. The net result will be occasional delays in responding to the target, caused by adjusting effort or outright attentional capture by distractors: effects that will be notably more pronounced in anxious patients (see Fig. 2B). As indicated earlier, when inhibitory demands escalate, effortful control will approach and then exceed the limits of capacity, leading eventually to failure in the ability to perform such tasks. Other cognitive biases in anxiety Although attention to emotional stimuli has been studied more than most other selective processes in anxiety, it is by no means the only cognitive bias that has been documented. In addition to attentional aspects, changes include an altered 'subjective risk' of the occurrence of events associated with the current worry, and a tendency to interpret essentially ambiguous information in favour of the most threatening meaning. Indeed, there is strong evidence that anxiety is associated with increased subjective risk of negative events, and a corresponding shift in the interpretation of ambiguous situations. Thus, those who are currently anxious tend to overestimate the risk of a feared outcome when compared with controls. More specifically, this increased probability is seen to apply mainly to themselves, rather than effecting everyone25.26.Similarly, when exposed to ambiguous information that could support either a threatening or a benign interpretation, anxious individuals are more likely than controls to adopt the threatening meaning~v 2~. When presented with a homograph (such as 'stroke'), anxious individuals show relatively more lexical decision priming for a threatening associate (such as 'disease'), while non-anxious controls show more priming for benign associates (such as 'caress'). This strong interpretative bias is reversed when state anxiety has been reduced, for example, in recovered patients 3.

Successful performance(non-anxious individual)

Perceptualrepresentation Attentionalselection
Task response

Perceptual input Task-related cue (T)

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U n s u c c e s s f u l p e r f o r m a n c e ( a n x i o u s individual) Perceptual representation Attentional selection

Perceptual input
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Anxiety increase

output C A m b i g u i t y ( a n x i o u s individual) Perceptualrepresentation Attentional selection

Perceptual input

Ambigu cue i

Threat interpretation

on a selective attention task (such as an emotional Stroop task) for a non-anxious individual: activation of the affective evaluation mechanism is low, therefore, its output is inhibited by outputs from the task-related representations, enabling responding to task requirements to continue successfully. (B) Unsuccessful performance on a selective attention task for an anxious individual: activation of the affective evaluation mechanism is high, thus, its output inhibits those from the task-related representations, interfering with responding to task requirements. (C) Interpretation of ambiguity: selection of the threatening or more benign interpretation of an ambiguous item is influenced by the evaluation of negative emotional meaning. For an anxious individual this makes the threatening interpretation more available.

OUtpUl Fig. 2 Performanceson selectiveattention tasks. (A) Successful performance

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Closely related to the descriptive model described in the main text is the modular neural network model termed the Evaluative Map Network (EMNET), which provides a simulation of the allocation of attention towards stimuli once they have been evaluated a. The full implementation of EMNET goes beyond the present descriptive model as it accounts also for the acquisition of affective evaluation by novel stimuli, through associations b'~. EMNET assumes that all inputs have access to an evaluative mechanism, which is in operation continuously and automatically, to determine the socio-biological significance of stimuli, and to modulate the learning of stimulus relationships. Three functions have been assigned to this evaluative mechanism: (1) It evaluates all incoming stimuli for emotional significance; although, for purposes ofsimplicity in simulations, only two values are returned, one for positive and one for negative valence. (2) It amplifies or inhibits inputs according to their evaluative strength. Assuming a limited attentional capacity, stimuli with high evaluations will inhibit the activity of those with
leSSer ev~uatiye st rength.

Task d e m a n d unit Input

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Fig. A HOW EMNET models an at~entional task in which an anxious individual responds in the of an emotional i!

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(3) The model assumes that anxiety inflates all negative evaluations while having no effect on positive evaluations, resulting :, in increased attention to negative stimuli. As an example, we model an attentional search task in which an individual responds to a neutral target (the task unit) in the presence of an emotional distractor. In the illustration (Fig. A), Perceptual Representation Units (PRUs) carry activations (Pi and P:), excited by their corresponding inputs ([~ from the task stimulus, and 12 from an emotional distractor). Each PRU has a continuous value between 0 and l, with a rest state of 0. Its activity is influenced by: (i) the stimulus strength, I1 and 12 (a value between 0 and 1); (ii) its evaluative strength, which is further modulated by anxiety; (iii) inhibitory connections from other active PRUs; and (iv) demand strength (the top-down controlled signal that attempts to direct attention towards the task unit). This demand unit amplifies the activity of the task unit, but this is possible only up to a limit determined by availability of controlled resources. In this example, P2 excites the evaluative mechanism, which in turn increases the activation of P~. Anxiety level operates to increase the output from the evaluative mechanism to P2. The resulting activity of a PRU is considered to represent the amount of attention it attracts. In the attentional search task illustrated, the number of iterations taken for the task unit to reach a certain threshold is taken as an analogue of the reaction time to the target item. A marked effect is seen when differences in anxiety level are simulated by the model. The degree of interference by a threat distractor (threat values of 0.1, 0.5 and 0.9 are illustrated in Fig. B) displays a curvilinear increase as anxiety level rises. Hence, as found in empirical research d, interference with the on-going task increases disproportionately at high anxiety levels. The ii;i threat value of the distractor only shows an appreciab'e influence on reaction time at high levels of anxiety.
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Fig. B EMNET simulations of responding on the attentional task with increasing levels of anxiety. References a Fulcher, E.P. (1995) The construction of evaluative maps: affective computations in the amygdala, in Neural Networks: Artificial Intelligence and Industrial Applications (Kappen, B. and Gielen, S., eds), pp. 95-99, Springer-Verlag b Levey, A.B. and Martin, I. {1990) Evaluative conditioning: Overview and further options. Special Issue: Evaluative conditioning
Cognition Emotion 4, 31-37

c Baeyens, F., Eelen, P. and Van den Bergh, O. (1990) Contingency awareness in evaluative conditioning: A case for unaware affective-evaluative learning. Special Issue: Evaluative conditioning Cognition Emotion 4, 3-18 d Mogg, K. et al. (1990) Effects of stress and anxiety on the

processingo, threat stimu,i,

1230-1237

,ocial ,',,cho, 59,

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Can we assume that the findings documented thus far suggest that memory will be influenced by anxiety? T h e existence o f a memory bias towards positive items in normal individuals, and a tendency for depressives to show the reverse, is now well established8. Given that emotional stimuli are usually easier to recall, and that anxious individuals attend selectively to threatening stimuli, it would be

expected that they too should show better recall for threatening events. It has been a source o f considerable puzzlement that such effects have not always been found and, occasionally, results have been in the reverse direction3L It might be assumed that because threatening stimuli are attended selectively, they will also be well encoded perceptually. O n e hypothesis commonly put forward to explain

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the lack of memory effects suggests that this advantage may not apply to semantic encoding, perhaps owing to deliberate avoidance of elaborative thought about aversive events. Because it is this latter type of processing that assists in typical recall tasks, where the semantic associations among items assists in retrieval, no explicit memory advantage parallels the attentional biases. Therefore, the question arises: do these biases, attentional and interpretative, arise from a common mechanism? The descriptive cognitive model already advanced suggests that this is probable. The affective evaluation system will enhance the perceptual representation of an imagined, threatening event, making it more salient and, apparently, more imminent. Likewise, ifa single (but complex) event is capable of supporting two incompatible interpretations, then the affective evaluation system in an anxious individual will increase the strength of the more threatening meaning, thus effectively inhibiting the benign alternative (see Fig. 2C). According to this view, attentional and interpretative biases arise for fundamentally similar reasons. Thus, the existence of cognitive biases in anxiety is well established, but to what extent are they subject to change, or amenable to educational and other training methods? Reduction of biases has been noted following treatments such as Cognitive-Behavioural-Therapy. Preliminary data of our own, using experimental training methods in the laboratory, have also been encouraging. These suggest that unselected individuals can be trained to attend either to more, or less, threatening meanings of complex stimuli. Furthermore, such training results in consistent changes in reported anxiety, even when subjects seem unaware of the reasons for the change. If these results are confirmed, they suggest that cognitive biases are not so automatic as to prevent their modification, and that they play at least some causal role in maintaining anxious mood. The challenge now is to put forward more detailed models incorporating both the development and maintenance of anxiety, as well as suggesting the locus and mechanism for these observed changes.

Outstanding

questions

Are cognitive biases causally implicated in anxiety disorders? Can we map cognitive biases in humans onto their neural substrate? = How automatic are cognitive biases? Can we use conscious processes to modify them? If so, how are we to understand interference from 'subliminal' stimuli? Why is the evidence on memory for threatening events in anxiety so variable? = In what form(s) are emotional representations encoded and how do these differ in high and low anxious individuals? = How can we explain the developmental origins of cognitive biases in anxiety?

processing of emotional information: Mediating roles of awareness, trait and state variables, and personal relevance of stimulus materials

Behav. Res. Therapy 30, 479~491

12 Mathews, A., Ridgeway, V. and Williamson, D.A. (1996) Evidence for attention to threatening stimuli in depression Behav. Res. Therapy 34, 695-705 13 Ohman, A. and Soares, J.J.F. (1994) "Unconscious anxiety": Phobic responses to masked stimuli J. Abnorm. Psychol. 103, 231-240 14 Broadbent, D.E. and Broadbent, M. (1988) Anxiety and attentional bias: State and trait Cognition Emotion 2, 165-183
15 Mogg, K. et aL (1990) Effects of stress and anxiety on the processing of

threat stimuli ./. Personality Social Psychol. 59, 1230--1237 16 MacLeod, C. and Mathews, A. (1988) Anxiety and the allocation of attention to threat Q. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Exp. Psychol. 38, 659-670 17 Roskos-Ewoldsen, D.R. and Fazio, R.H. (1992) On the orienting value of attitudes: Attitude accessibility as a determinant of an object's attraction of visual attention J. Personality Social Psychol. 63, 198-211
18 Pratto,

F. and John, O.P. (1991) The attention-grabbing power

of negative social information J. Personality Social Psychol. 61, 380-391 19 Niedenthal, P.M. (1990) Implicit perception of affective information

J. Exp. Social Psychol. 26, 505-527

20 Gray, J.A. (1982) The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, Oxford University

Press 21 LeDoux, J.E. (1995) Emotion: Clues from the brain Annu. Rev. Psychol. 46, 209-235
22 Armony, J.L. et aL (1997) Computational modeling of emotion:

Explorations

through

the

anatomy

and

physiology

of

fear

conditioning Trends Cognit. Sci. 1, 28-34 23 Gallagher, M. and Holland, P.C. (1994) The amygdala complex:
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Multiple roles in associative learning and attention Proc. Natl. Acad.

1 Williams, J.M.G., Mathews, A. and MacLeod, C. (1996) The emotional Stroop task and psychopathology PsychoL Bull. 120, 3-24 2 Mathews, A. eta/. (1990) Attentional bias in anxiety: Selective search or defective filtering? J. Abnorm. Psychol. 99, 166-173 3 Mathews, A. et al. (1995) Effect of psychological treatment on cognitive bias in Generalised Anxiety Disorder 8ehav. Res. Therapy33, 293-303 4 Bryne, A. and Eysenck, M.W. (1995) Trait anxiety, anxious mood, and threat detection Cognition Emotion 9, 549-562 5 MacLeod, C., Mathews, A. and Tata, P. (1986) Attentional bias in emotional disorders./. Abnorm. Psycho/. 95, 15-20 6 Mogg, K., Mathews, A.M. and Eysenck, M. (1992) Attentional bias to threat in clinical anxiety states Cognition Emo6on 6, 149-159 7 Mathews, A. and MacLeod, C. (1994) Cognitive approaches to emotion and emotional disorders Annu. Rev. Psychol. 45, 25-50 8 Riemann, B.C. and NcNally, R.J. (1995) Cognitive processing of personally relevant information Cognition Emotion 9, 325-340 9 Mathews, A. and Klug, F. (1993) Emotionality and interference with colour-naming in anxiety Behav. Res. Therapy 31, 57-62 10 Mogg, K. et al. (1993) Subliminal processing of emotional information in anxiety and depression J. Abnorm. Psychol. 102, 304-311
11 MacLeod, C. and Rutherford, E.M. (1992) Anxiety and the selective

Sci. U. 5, A. 91, 11771-11776

24 MacLeod, C. and Mathews, A. (1991) Biased cognitive operations in anxiety: accessibility of information or assignment of processing priorities Behav. Res. Therapy29, 599~10
25 Butler, G. and Mathews, A.M. (1983) Cognitive processes in anxiety

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26 Butler, G. and Mathews, A.M. (1987) Anticipatory anxiety and risk

perception Cognit. Therapy Res. 91,551-565

27 Mathews, A.M., Richards, A. and Eysenck, M. (1989) Interpretation of

homophones related to threat in anxiety states J. Abnorm. Psychol. 98, 31-34

28 Calvo, M.G. and Castillo, M.D. (1997) Mood congruent bias in

interpretation of ambiguity: strategic

processes and temporary

activation O. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Exp. PsychoL 50A, 163-182

29 Richards, A. and French, C.C. (1992) An anxiety-related bias in semantic

activation when processing threat/neutral homographs Q. J. Exp.

PsychoL Num. Exp. Psychol. 45, 503-525

30 Eysenck, M.W. et al. (1991) Bias in interpretation of ambiguous

sentences related to threat in anxiety J. Abnorm. Psychol. 100, 144-150 31 Mogg, K., Mathews, A.M. and Weinman, J. (1987) Memory bias in clinical anxiety J. Abnorm. Psychol. 96, 94-98

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