Increased attention but more efficient disengagement: neuroscientific evidence for defensive processing of...

Previous studies indicate that people respond defensively to threatening health information, especially when the information challenges self-relevant goals. The authors investigated whether reduced acceptance of self-relevant health risk information is already visible in early attention processes, that is, attention disengagement processes.

In a randomized, controlled trial with 29 smoking and nonsmoking students, a variant of Posner's cueing task was used in combination with the high-temporal resolution method of event-related brain potentials (ERPs).

Reaction times and P300 ERP.

Smokers showed lower P300 amplitudes in response to high- as opposed to low-threat invalid trials when moving their attention to a target in the opposite visual field, indicating more efficient attention disengagement processes. Furthermore, both smokers and nonsmokers showed increased P300 amplitudes in response to the presentation of high- as opposed to low-threat valid trials, indicating threat-induced attention-capturing processes. Reaction time measures did not support the ERP data, indicating that the ERP measure can be extremely informative to measure low-level attention biases in health communication.

The findings provide the first neuroscientific support for the hypothesis that threatening health information causes more efficient disengagement among those for whom the health threat is self-relevant.