Bias in attending to emotional facial expressions: Anxiety and visual search efficiency

摘要

There has been much controversy around the relationship between anxiety and attentional processing of threat-related information. The purpose of this study was to examine how threatening facial expressions affect attentional processing, according to the level of trait anxiety. Through visual search tasks, two different components of attentional bias to threat were investigated: engagement and disengagement of attention from an angry face. Two main results were found. First, reaction times (RTs) were slower in detecting the absence of a discrepant face in the all angry-display conditions rather than other expression conditions; however, there was no difference between anxiety groups. Second, the difference in search efficiency for the angry versus happy target was significant within the high-anxiety group but not within the low-anxiety group. The results suggest that the detection process for angry faces is more efficient for highly anxious people. On the other hand, the time to disengage attention from angry faces was not associated with anxiety level. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.