Anxiety and attentional control: the role of emotional stimuli

The relationship between anxiety and attentional process is unclear. Many studies show an attentional bias in the detection of threatening stimuli. This attentional bias could be related to a poor cognitive control. The Flanker Task could be used to the assessment of executive control. In this task, the participant is instructed to respond to the target ignoring the distractor stimuli (the flankers). The Attentional Network Test for Interaction (ANT-I) combines a spatial cuing paradigm with a flanker procedure and examines the interaction between the attentional networks (alerting, orienting and executive control). The alerting is involved in the maintaining an alert state. The orienting is engaged in the selection of the information. The executive control allows the conflict resolution. The aim of the study is to analyze the relation between anxiety and attentional networks. We used a modified version of ANTI. In the ANTI – Emotion (ANTI-E), we replaced the arrows in the flanker task with neutral and threatening faces. Anxious individuals (AI; N=36) and No Anxious individuals (NA; N=31) have completed the State Trait Anxiety Inventory and the ANTI-E. A Group (AI; NA) x Alerting (no warning;warning) x Validity (valid; invalid;no cue) x Congruency (congruent;incongruent) x Emotion (threatening;neutral) ANOVA on mean reaction times (RTs) confirms all the main effects and shows a significant Group x Congruency x Validity interaction, which reveal shorter RTs in the Congruent compared to Incongruent No-Cue trials(869ms vs 916ms; F1,38=5,19; p=.02, d=.56) only in AI group. The AI shows a higher attentional focus when the target is a neutral face rather than a threatening face, i.e., AI, compared to NA, have shown slower RTs in the incongruent condition. These findings could suggest a poor cognitive control in AI, compared to NA. These results could have implications in clinical training aimed to increase the cognitive control in anxious individuals.