Emotion and anxiety interact to bias spatial attention.

What is it about?

Facial expressions play a crucial role in identifying the feelings of those around us and are essential for interpersonal communication. Therefore, emotional faces grab more of our attention than neutral ones – a phenomenon commonly known as “emotional attention.” This study seeks to understand how anxiety influences emotional attention, a timely topic given the marked increase in anxiety in the population following the COVID-19 pandemic. This study reveals an important role of positively valenced stimuli, such as happy faces, in capturing and holding our attention, which has previously been overlooked. This finding indicates that the level of anxiety a person experiences can impact how they pay attention to emotional stimuli, such as increased attentional bias for threat in individuals with high levels of anxiety.

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Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Understanding how we perceive emotional expressions is crucial to the study of healthy human behavior and maladaptive states, such as high levels of anxiety. This study, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic when many experienced heightened states of anxiety, contributes to our understanding of how anxiety influences our attention to emotional facial expressions. The study elucidates the complex interaction between emotion, anxiety, and attention in our daily social lives by examining attentional capture and attentional disengagement from both angry and happy emotional faces. This study also sheds light on how individuals with high levels of anxiety interact with and perceive their social environments. These findings carry important implications for theoretical models of emotional attention and may offer valuable insights for clinical interventions for individuals with anxiety disorders. Image credit: Shutterstock, Image adapted by the study investigators.