Covert and overt orienting of attention to emotional faces in anxiety

Attentional biases for emotional faces were investigated in high, medium, a nd low anxiety groups (N = 54) using a probe detection task. Four types of facial expression (threat, sad, happy, neutral) were used to examine the sp ecificity of the bias. Attentional bias measures were derived from manual r eaction times (RTs) to probes and the direction of initial eye movement (EM ) to the faces. The RT data indicated enhanced vigilance for threat rather than neutral faces in high and medium, but not low, state anxiety. The bias for negative faces appeared to be a combined function of stimulus threat v alue and the individual's anxiety level. The RT bias did not seem to depend on overt orienting, as many participants made few EMs. However, those who made frequent EMs to the faces showed concordance between the RT and EM bia s measures, and so the RT measure of attentional bias for negative versus p ositive faces at 500 ms appears to provide a valid index of the direction o f initial orienting to emotional stimuli. There was no evidence of an anxie ty-related bias for happy faces (predicted by the emotionality hypothesis), nor a dysphoria-related bias for sad faces. However, increased dysphoria s cores were associated with reduced attentiveness to happy faces.