State anxiety impairs attentional control when other sources of control are minimal

ABSTRACT

Research suggests anxiety impairs attentional control; however, this effect has been unreliable. We argue that anxiety’s impairment of attentional control is subtle, and can be obscured by other non-emotional sources of control. We demonstrate this by examining conflict adaptation, an enhancement in attentional control following a trial with high conflict between distracter and target stimuli. Participants completed a Stroop task featuring incongruent (e.g. RED in green font; high-conflict) and control (e.g. +++ in green font; low-conflict) trials. More state-anxious participants showed greater Stroop interference following control trials, but interference was uniformly low following incongruent trials. This suggests state anxiety can impair attention, but other sources of top-down control – such as conflict adaptation – can easily overcome this impairment. This is consistent with recent theories of anxious cognition and shows that anxiety researchers must attend to the dynamics and sources of attentional control.

KEYWORDS:

• Anxiety
• attentional control
• Stroop
• conflict adaptation
• reactive control

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Melike Aker, Zeynep Duygun, Gizem Han, Gyulten Hyusein, Fulya Mücaviroğlu, and Berrak Şahin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.