To pay attention or not: The associations between attentional bias towards negative emotional information and anxiety, guilt feelings, and experiential avoidance in dementia family caregivers

Abstract

Caring for a relative with dementia has been linked to negative consequences for caregivers’ psychological health, such as anxiety or guilt. Cognitive theories of psychopathology propose that attentional bias towards negative stimuli contribute to the development and maintenance of emotional disorders and clinical symptomatology. However, attentional bias has scarcely been explored in dementia family caregivers. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between attentional bias and anxiety symptomatology, guilt feelings, and experiential avoidance in a sample of dementia family caregivers. Participants were 226 dementia family caregivers. Attentional bias was measured using a novel priming adaptation of the dot-probe task. The sample was divided into high and low anxiety symptomatology, guilt feelings, and experiential avoidance groups. The results revealed two opposite patterns of emotional information processing in dementia family caregivers. While anxiety was found to be associated with an attentional preference for negative information, experiential avoidance was related to attentional avoidance of this information. Although guilt was also related to an attentional preference for negative information, this relationship was no longer significant when controlling for anxiety levels. These inflexible attentional patterns may have negative clinical consequences, given that in both cases relevant information necessary for adaptive coping with the stressful situation of caregiving may be unattended to or omitted.