Affective attention under cognitive load: reduced emotional biases but emergent anxiety-related costs to inhibitory control

Abstract

Trait anxiety is associated with deficits in attentional control, particularly in the ability to inhibit prepotent responses. Here, we investigated this effect while varying the level of cognitive load in a modified antisaccade task that employed emotional facial expressions (neutral, happy, and angry) as targets. Load was manipulated using a secondary auditory task requiring recognition of tones (low load), or recognition of specific tone pitch (high load). Results showed that load increased antisaccade latencies on trials where gaze toward face stimuli should be inhibited. This effect was exacerbated for high anxious individuals. Emotional expression also modulated task performance on antisaccade trials for both high and low anxious participants under low cognitive load, but did not influence performance under high load. Collectively, results (1) suggest that individuals reporting high levels of anxiety are particularly vulnerable to the effects of cognitive load on inhibition, and (2) support recent evidence that loading cognitive processes can reduce emotional influences on attention and cognition.

Keywords: antisaccade task; cognitive load; threat processing; trait anxiety; visual attention.

Figure 1

Example trial display (not to scale). (A) Following fixation, a face image appeared either in the left or right periphery, displaying either a neutral, angry, or happy emotional expression. Depending on the block type, participants were asked to move their eyes from fixation to the image as quickly as possible, or look away from the image and move their eyes to the opposite end of the screen. (B) In addition to eye movements, participants simultaneously responded verbally to tones played during blocks. Under low load, participants always heard a mid-pitched tone, and responded by saying “tone” each time they heard a sound. (C) Under high load, tones were presented at three different pitches, and participants responded to this with “low,” “mid,” or “high” when a tone played. All tones played randomly every 1900–2300 ms.

Figure 2

Correlation between trait anxiety score and load-induced inhibitory costs on saccadic eye-movements.