Attentional bias for threat: Evidence for delayed disengagement from emotional faces

Fox, Elaine; Russo, Riccardo; Dutton, Kevin · 2002 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1080/02699930143000527

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Summary

This paper investigates the nature of attentional bias in anxiety, specifically testing the hypothesis that anxious individuals exhibit delayed disengagement from threat-related stimuli rather than facilitated initial orientation toward them. While previous research using probe detection tasks suggested that anxious people prioritize threatening cues, the authors argue that such tasks cannot distinguish between rapid initial orienting and prolonged attentional dwell-time. To address this, the study employs a cueing paradigm where participants categorize targets appearing either in the same location as a facial cue (valid trials) or a different location (invalid trials). The critical measure is reaction time on invalid trials, which reflects the difficulty of shifting attention away from the cue. The research aims to determine if trait anxiety influences this disengagement process and how emotional valence (angry, happy, neutral) affects attentional mechanisms. The study comprises three experiments involving undergraduate participants classified as high or low trait anxiety based on State-Trait Anxiety Inventory scores. Experiment 1 utilized a target categorization task with schematic facial cues (angry, happy, neutral) presented for 250 ms, followed by a target after a 300 ms onset asynchrony. This design eliminated motor preparation confounds present in earlier localization tasks. Experiments 2 and 3 employed an Inhibition of Return (IOR) paradigm with longer cue-target intervals to test whether threat cues disrupt the typical inhibition of previously attended locations. In Experiment 2, the SOA was increased to induce IOR, while Experiment 3 included threat-related and jumbled facial stimuli to examine effects on ambiguous cues. The results demonstrated that the valence of facial cues significantly influenced response times on invalid trials. In Experiment 1, participants took longer to respond to targets following angry or happy cues compared to neutral cues, indicating that emotional stimuli hold attention longer than neutral ones. Crucially, high trait anxious participants showed significantly slower reaction times on invalid trials following angry faces compared to neutral faces, supporting the delayed disengagement hypothesis. In Experiment 2, the angry face cue eliminated the typical IOR effect for both high and low trait anxious groups, suggesting that angry faces prevent the automatic inhibition of returning attention to the cued location. Experiment 3 further revealed that threat-related and ambiguous (jumbled) cues reduced the magnitude of IOR specifically for high trait anxious participants, but not for low trait anxious participants. These findings conclude that attentional bias in anxiety is characterized by a difficulty in disengaging attention from threat-related and emotional stimuli, rather than merely a faster initial orientation. The study provides evidence that trait anxiety is associated with prolonged attentional dwell-time on threatening cues, which disrupts normal attentional shifting mechanisms like IOR. This supports theoretical models suggesting that anxiety involves a specific deficit in disengaging from potential threats, with implications for understanding the maintenance of anxiety disorders through persistent attentional focus on threat.

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• hazard perception