Attention and Anxiety: Different AttentionalFunctioning Under State and Trait Anxiety

摘要

Anxiety modulates the functioning of attention. Although the existence of this relationship is clear, its nature is still poorlydefined. Added are the facts that different types of anxiety—state or trait—may influence attention differently and that attentionis not a unitary system. We studied the influence of such types of anxiety by means of a task that, using emotionally neutralinformation, assesses the efficiency of three attentional networks: orienting, alerting, and executive control. Results showed adouble dissociation. Trait anxiety was related to deficiencies in the executive control network, but state anxiety was associatedwith an overfunctioning of the alerting and orienting networks.