Interactions between Anxiety and Emotional Attention

RM 218

Recent studies have reported complex interactions between anxiety and emotional attention. Emotional stimuli have been shown to bias attention in various tasks including emotional Stroop tasks. Also, a negative mood may narrow and a positive mood may expand the attentional scope. We compared between emotional and neutral words in an emotional disruption Stroop task. Results showed that attentional capture by emotional words was greater for the high anxiety than for the low anxiety group. In an emotional flanker task, a target (happy or sad face) appeared with two flankers at near or far locations. Compatibility effects were found for both near and far conditions for the happy target but only for the near condition for the sad target, suggesting that the attentional scope was narrowed with the sad target. Implications for relations among the attentional bias, attentional scope, and attentional control models will be discussed.