Evidence from the eyes: Threatening postures hold attention

Abstract

Efficient detection of threat provides obvious survival advantages and has resulted in a fast and accurate threat-detection system. Although beneficial under normal circumstances, this system may become hypersensitive and cause threat-processing abnormalities. Past research has shown that anxious individuals have difficulty disengaging attention from threatening faces, but it is unknown whether other forms of threatening social stimuli also influence attentional orienting. Much like faces, human body postures are salient social stimuli, because they are informative of one's emotional state and next likely action. Additionally, postures can convey such information in situations in which another's facial expression is not easily visible. Here we investigated whether there is a threat-specific effect for high-anxious individuals, by measuring the time that it takes the eyes to leave the attended stimulus, a task-irrelevant body posture. The results showed that relative to nonthreating postures, threat-related postures hold attention in anxious individuals, providing further evidence of an anxiety-related attentional bias for threatening information. This is the first study to demonstrate that attentional disengagement from threatening postures is affected by emotional valence in those reporting anxiety.

Keywords: Anxiety; Attention; Eye movements; Postures; Threat.