The comparing of hypervigilance to the threat model with Gray s Neuropsychology model in anxious persons

Purpose: common views about anxiety and etiology of it are important for many reasons, these views not only present articular analysis of vulnerability foundation mechanisms to clinical anxiety and its continuance, but also in addition to it, they provide a theoretical foundation for transformation of anti-anxiety treatments. The purpose of doing current research was to compare two views of Gray s neuropsychology (1981) and Williams Watts & Mathews,s hypervigilance to threat model in anxious persons, Gray s view (1981) predicts that anxious persons that are influenced by performance of some of brain structures, pay more attention to the initial environmental signals and they are influenced less by unrelated environmental signals, consequently these persons indicate more response correctness in tasks from themselves, in contrast hypervigilance view expresses that anxious persons pay attention only to the threatening environmental signals, therefore they commit more errors than normal persons.Method: in this research, 130 triable persons (67 persons with high anxiety and 63 persons with low anxiety) completed pictorial picture-word task and Beck Inventory. Two variance analysis plans with repeated measurement (2×3) were used for evaluation of main and interactional effect.Findings: the results indicated that in experimental trials, anxious persons act slower than persons with low anxiety and indicate more errors.

Keywords:

anxiety , hypervigilance to threat , neuropsychology view , attentional bias