Using panicogenic inhalations of carbon dioxide enriched air to induce attentional bias for threat: Implications for the development of anxiety disorders

The tendency for anxious individuals to selectively attend to threatening information is believed to cause and exacerbate anxious emotional responding in a self-perpetuating cycle. The present study sought to examine the relation between differential interoceptive conditioning (IC) using carbon dioxide inhalation as a panicogenic unconditioned stimulus (US) and the development of Stroop colour-naming interference to various non-word conditioned stimuli (CSs). Healthy university students (N = 27) underwent the assessment of colour-naming interference to reinforced CS+ and non-reinforced CS− non-words prior to and following differential fear conditioning. Participants showed greater magnitude electrodermal and verbal-evaluative responses to the CS+ over the CS− non-word following IC, and demonstrated the expected slower colour-naming latencies to the CS+ compared to the CS− non-word from baseline to post-conditioning. We discuss the relation between fear learning and the emergence of attentional bias for threat to further understand the maintenance of anxiety disorders.