Anxiety and orienting of gaze to angry and fearful faces

Abstract

Neuroscience research indicates that individual differences in anxiety may be attributable to a neural system for threat-processing, involving the amygdala, which modulates attentional vigilance, and which is more sensitive to fearful than angry faces. Complementary cognitive studies indicate that high-anxious individuals show enhanced visuospatial orienting towards angry faces, but it is unclear whether fearful faces elicit a similar attentional bias. This study compared biases in initial orienting of gaze to fearful and angry faces, which varied in emotional intensity, in high- and low-anxious individuals. Gaze was monitored whilst participants viewed a series of face-pairs. Results showed that fearful and angry faces elicited similar attentional biases. High-anxious individuals were more likely to direct gaze at intense negative facial expressions, than low-anxious individuals, whereas the groups did not differ in orienting to mild negative expressions. Implications of the findings for research into the neural and cognitive bases of emotion processing are discussed.

Fig. 1

Example of continuum for angry (top row) and fearful (bottom row) facial expressions.

Fig. 2

Mean proportion of trials on which the initial shift of gaze was directed towards negative rather than neutral faces, shown as a function of the type (fearful or angry) and emotional intensity of the facial expression, in the low anxiety (left panel) and high anxiety (right panel) groups.