Emotion and anxiety interact to bias spatial attention

Abstract

Emotional expressions are an evolutionarily conserved means of social communication essential for social interactions. It is important to understand how anxious individuals perceive their social environments, including emotional expressions, especially with the rising prevalence of anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anxiety is often associated with an attentional bias for threat-related stimuli, such as angry faces. Yet the mechanisms by which anxiety enhances or impairs two key components of spatial attention-attentional capture and attentional disengagement-to emotional expressions are still unclear. Moreover, positive valence is often ignored in studies of threat-related attention and anxiety, despite the high occurrence of happy faces during everyday social interaction. Here, we investigated the relationship between anxiety, emotional valence, and spatial attention in 574 participants across two preregistered studies (data collected in 2021 and 2022; Experiment 1: n = 154, 54.5% male, M_age = 43.5 years; Experiment 2: n = 420, 58% male, M_age = 36.46 years). We found that happy faces capture attention more quickly than angry faces during the visual search experiment and found delayed disengagement from both angry and happy faces over neutral faces during the spatial cueing experiment. We also show that anxiety has a distinct impact on both attentional capture and disengagement of emotional faces. Together, our findings highlight the role of positively valenced stimuli in attracting and holding attention and suggest that anxiety is a critical factor in modulating spatial attention to emotional stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Figure 1.

Visual search a) task trial procedure and b) study design. After a brief fixation pulse, a circular array of faces of either set size 4 or 8 appeared on the screen. Participants were asked to respond whether a target emotion, happy or angry, was present or absent from the screen with response keys “p” and “a”. Feedback was given if participants are too slow. An example of a set size 4, angry target-present trial is seen on the left and a set size 8, target-absent trial (both with a neutral crowd) is on the right.

Figure 2.

Visual search performance (a. accuracy, b. reaction time, and c. inverse efficiency score) for each target emotion and set size. Number of participants: n = 154. *** p < .001, two-tailed paired t-test.

Figure 3.

Correlation between state and trait anxiety for happy and angry targets (a–b), and the difference in search accuracy for differently valenced targets (c–d). Anxiety group comparison for valence index (e–f). Number of participants in a–d: n = 154. Number of participants in e: n_{(low state anxiety)} = 30, n_{(high state anxiety)} = 33. Number of participants in f: n_{(low trait anxiety)} = 29, n_{(high trait anxiety)} = 31. ** p < .01, * p < .05, two-tailed Pearson correlation in c–d, two-tailed independent samples t-test in e–f.

Figure 4.

Spatial cueing task trial procedure. After a brief fixation pulse, a face with varying expression (angry, happy, or neutral) cued the likely location of the target (a white dot) that was either 0.8 deg above or below the center of the face. Participants were instructed to press “b” if the dot was below the midline and “h” if the dot was above the midline. The example on the left shows a cue-invalid trial and the one on the right shows a cue-valid trial.

Figure 5.

Differences in reaction time (ms) between low and high state anxiety groups to disengage from a) angry b) happy and c) neutral face cues ** p < .01, * p < .05, two-tailed independent samples t-test.

Figure 6.

Differences in time (ms) that it took a) high state anxiety participants and b) low state anxiety participants to disengage from an emotional face cue compared to neutral faces. * p < .05, † p < .1, n.s. not significant, two-tailed paired t-test.