Anxiety and attentional bias for threat: an event-related potential study

Abstract

We investigated the attentional bias for threat in selected high and low trait-anxious participants using an event-related potential technique. A modified cue-target paradigm was adopted with threatening and nonthreatening pictures as uninformative location cues. In high anxious individuals, reactions were speeded up and the occipitoparietal P1 amplitude was enhanced when targets appeared at the same location as threatening pictures relative to nonthreatening ones, whereas in low anxious individuals, the P1 amplitude tended to be enhanced when the targets appeared at the opposite location to threatening pictures. These results suggest that the attentional bias caused by peripheral threatening stimuli is able to modulate the visual inputs in early processing stages, and this mechanism is markedly influenced by an individual's anxiety level.