Exploring attentional bias in nursing students under sadness priming: A dot-probe study

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Nursing Education

Background:

• Nursing students face emotionally challenging situations, including patient deaths.
• Understanding emotional influences on attention is crucial for mental well-being in healthcare professionals.
• Attentional bias is a cognitive mechanism linked to emotional processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effect of sadness priming on attentional bias in nursing students.
• To determine if induced sadness influences how nursing students attend to emotional stimuli.
• To explore the relationship between emotional priming and attentional processes in a vulnerable population.

Main Methods:

• Employed a dot-probe task to assess attentional bias.
• Randomly assigned 60 nursing students with experience of patient deaths into sadness priming and control groups.
• Measured reaction times to sad and neutral faces under different conditions.

Main Results:

• The sadness priming group exhibited longer reaction times to sad faces in inconsistent conditions (p=0.001).
• This group showed shorter reaction times to sad faces in consistent conditions compared to neutral faces (p<0.001).
• Attention orientation and bias indices were significantly higher in the sadness group compared to controls (p=0.017) and greater than zero (p=0.004, p=0.001).

Conclusions:

• Sadness priming induces an attentional bias towards sad stimuli in nursing students.
• This bias is characterized by facilitated attention to emotionally negative cues.
• Findings highlight the impact of emotional states on cognitive processing in nursing students.