دانلود رایگان مقاله استفاده زیاد شاهدانه و اجتناب از محرک توجه مرتبط با اضطراب

Abstract

Objectives: Cannabis is now the most widely used illicit substance in the world. Previous research demonstrates that cannabis use is associated with dysfunctional affect regulation and anxiety. Anxiety is characterised by attentional biases in the presence of emotional information. This novel study therefore examined the attentional bias of cannabis users when presented with anxiety-related stimuli. The aim was to establish whether cannabis users respond to anxiety-related stimuli differently to control participants. Methods: A dot-probe paradigm was utilised using undergraduate students. Trials contained anxiety-related stimuli and neutral control stimuli. Eye-tracking was used to measure attention for the stimuli. Results: Results indicated that cannabis users demonstrated attentional-avoidance behaviour when presented with anxiety-related stimuli. Conclusions: The findings suggest a difference in processing of emotional information in relation to neutral information between groups. It would appear that cannabis users avoid anxiety provoking stimuli. Such behaviour could potentially have motivational properties that could lead to exacerbating anxiety disorder-type behaviour

4. Discussion

During this experiment we performed an anxiety-related dot-probe task in order to investigate whether cannabis users differed from control participants with regard to their attention toward anxiety-related cues. We found a significant difference between cannabis users and controls in terms of dwell time for anxiety-related stimuli with cannabis users demonstrating a decreased dwell time. However, this result was not observed for the other dot-probe dependent variables. Nevertheless, we suggest that this experiment demonstrates that the cannabis users in our sample demonstrated increased attentional avoidance for anxiety-related stimuli.