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.