Search

It is well-established that emotional stimuli, such as angry and happy faces, receive more attention than neutral stimuli (for a review, see Vuilleumier, 2005). Despite the consensus that the emotional significance of sensory events influences attention, the mechanism of emotional attention has not been fully understood. Additionally, an enduring attentional bias toward threat is commonly observed in highly anxious individuals (Bar-Haim et al., 2007). However, the exact type of anxiety—state or trait—that modulates the attentional bias for threat has not been agreed upon (Moser et al., 2012; Pacheco-Unguetti et al., 2010).

Despite many behavioral demonstrations of emotional attention (i.e., emotional stimuli receive more attention than neutral stimuli, for a review, see Vuilleumier, 2005), the exact mechanism by which emotional faces receive privileged processing is still unclear. One possibility is that emotional faces are harder to disengage from attention compared to neutral stimuli. More specifically, there are two seemingly contradictory hypotheses frequently cited to explain evidence of fear-related attentional bias: vigilance-avoidance (Mogg & Bradley, 1998) and attention maintenance (Fox et al., 2001). Additionally, highly anxious individuals are found to have an even stronger attentional bias toward threat, yet the attentional mechanism by which this occurs - facilitated capture and/or delayed disengagement – is not yet known (Bar-Haim et al., 2007). In our previous preregistered study (10.17605/OSF.IO/S975H), we examined how emotional valence and anxiety modulate attentional capture. Here, we will focus on attentional disengagement. We will examine the impact of the emotional valence of the cue (angry and happy faces) on attentional disengagement using an emotional spatial cueing paradigm (Fox et al., 2001) and how anxiety modulates attentional disengagement.