Information processing in anxious participants during stress was characterized by early selective attention of emotional stimuli, occurring prior to full conscious awareness, followed by effortful avoidance of threat.
In the same line, Mackintosh and Mathews (2003) postulate that when the importance and emotional significance of threatening stimuli increase, anxiety patients show a reflexive attentional bias toward threat instead of avoidance of threat.
Delusional information processing has been suggested to involve an initial vigilance for threat, followed by active avoidance of threat during later controlled information processing stages (Green and Phillips, 2004).
We may then be able to postulate that CS patients had been taking the strategy of cognitive avoidance of the threat cues before attending CBT treatment.
In these, a key behavioral assay comprises passive avoidance of potential threat and inhibition, both thought to be controlled by ventral hippocampus [ 2 6].
Indeed, the hippocampus has been associated with avoidance of potential threat (Bach et al. 2014; Bannerman et al. 2014), the expression of memory-dependent on behavioral inhibition (Bannerman et al. 2012), and inhibitory control of action for reward (Chudasama et al. 2012; Abela et al. 2013; Abela and Chudasama 2014).
For example, depressive behaviour may (unwittingly) be negatively reinforced by avoidance of, or escape from, threats, and positively reinforced by social attention and help from peers, relatives or (in the case of humans) professionals who focus upon the depressed individual's suffering and attempt to alleviate it by various means [ 29].
The satellites in the cluster, modelled as a swarm of agents, follow biological rules of "avoidance" of each other and the threat, "gather" to maintain the formation cluster and "attraction" towards target location according to pre-defined artificial potential functions.
Healthy volunteers took part in experiments 1 4, and patients with hippocampus sclerosis in experiment 4. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated behavior under approach-avoidance conflict with two slightly different realizations of threat levels.
Thus, a single dose testosterone administration reduces automatic avoidance of social threat and promotes relative increase of threat approach tendencies in healthy females.
Research evidence of women's traumatic experience indicates experiences of intrusions, maladaptive beliefs, avoidance, re-experiencing, emotional numbing and arousal, hyperarousal, flashbacks and nightmares, dissociation, sense of threat, shame, anger and fear (Ayers et al. 2007).
