Unhelpful Habits 173
prevent you from attending to other parts of your environ-
ment (that is, the neutral or positive parts).
In one study (Cisler and Olatunji 2010), participants
with and without fears of contamination underwent a series
of attentional tasks. In one such task, participants viewed
two boxes displayed on a screen. Inside each box was a
picture with one of the following valences: threat, disgust, or
neutrality. So, participants could see a threatening picture
on the left side of the screen and a neutral picture on the
right side of the screen, a neutral picture on the left side of
the screen and a disgusting picture on the right side of the
screen, and so forth. Each set of pictures was brief ly shown
on the screen; then the pictures disappeared and a symbol
appeared in one of the boxes. The participant then clicked
on a button corresponding to the symbol. The results of the
study demonstrated that those with higher levels of contam-
ination fear exhibited more difficulty in disengaging from
threat, because when the symbol appeared on the other side
of the screen from a threatening picture, it took them longer
to direct their attention to the symbol. In other words, their
attention was fixed on the place where the threatening
picture had been.
Eventual Threat Avoidance
Another very interesting phenomenon concerns what
eventually occurs when someone looks at a threat for a longer
period of time. We know that anxious individuals have an
initial tendency to direct their attention toward threat, but
then what happens? Recent research suggests that people
tend to avoid threatening stimuli after the initial attraction.
One study (Koster et al. 2005) found that when threatening