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Abstract
Cognitive models of anxiety propose that anxiety is associated with an attentional bias for threat, which increases vulnerability to emotional distress and is difficult to control. The study aim was to investigate relationships between the effects of threatening information, anxiety, and attention control on eye movements. High and low trait anxious individuals performed antisaccade and prosaccade tasks with angry, fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Results indicated that high-anxious participants showed a greater antisaccade cost for angry than neutral faces (i.e., relatively slower to look away from angry faces), compared with low-anxious individuals. This bias was not found for fearful or happy faces. The bias for angry faces was not related to individual differences in attention control assessed on self-report and behavioural measures. Findings support the view that anxiety is associated with difficulty in using cognitive control resources to inhibit attentional orienting to angry faces, and that attention control is multifaceted.
Notes
1The provision of feedback on antisaccade tasks is standard practice (e.g., Derakshan et al., 2009; Hardin et al., 2007; Jazbec et al., 2005). Thus, feedback was provided to help comparison with previous research findings and also make the task easier for participants, and keep errors to a minimum.
2Feedback was only provided on practice trials since the ANT is much simpler than, for instance, the antisaccade task (e.g., error rates were 22% on the antisaccade trials and 2% on the ANT). Using feedback on practice trials and not on experimental trials is also standard procedure (e.g., Fan et al., 2002; Reinholdt-Dunne et al., 2009), which allowed for comparison with findings from previous studies using the ANT.