Anxiety-linked attentional bias: Disengagement of attention or behavioral freezing?

Altered attentional processes for anxiety-linked stimuli are well known and play a role in many psychological anxiety treatments such as the dot-probe task. However, it is still unclear whether the slowing of response time in the presence of anxiety-linked stimuli is due to attentional processes, particularly delayed disengagement, or due to freezing, a behavioral response in the face of a threatening situation. Three criteria which were postulated by Clark et al. (2011) are necessary to differentiate between delayed disengagement and behavioral freezing: (1) Control of behavioral freezing, (2) control for even distribution of initial focus of attention and (3) control of the ease with which attention is shifted. Unlike previous studies, we believe we meet all three criteria with our adapted circular visual search paradigm initially developed by Stefani et al. (2020). In this paradigm, participants have to saccade away from an irrelevant picture in the center that can be the same (congruent), similar (incongruent), or not related to the target (neutral) (criteria 2). Participants then have to saccade to a peripheral anxiety-linked picture (criteria 3) with a specific feature (direction: left or right) to which they have to respond (criteria 1). The time between the fixation of the target and the response, the manual response time, represents the indicator for behavioral freezing. Saccadic latencies are the time between the presentation of the search display and the start of the first saccade. Two anxiety groups (low vs. high) have to perform this visual search for one of six possible types of phobia (dentist, needle, spider, snake, mouse/rat, or dog), depending on their pre-assessed levels of phobia. Thus, we can control if a slowing in manual response time or saccadic latency is due to behavioral freezing or delayed disengagement.