Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety?

Biases in information processing undoubtedly play an important role in the maintenance of emotion and emotional disorders.In an attentional cueing paradigm, threat words and angry faces had no advantage over positive or neutral words (or faces) in attracting attention to their own location, even for people who were highly state-anxious.In contrast, the presence of threatening cues (words and faces) had a strong impact on the disengagement of attention.When a threat cue was presented and a target subsequently presented in another location, high state-anxious individuals took longer to detect the target relative to when either a positive or a neutral cue was presented.It is concluded that threat-related stimuli affect attentional dwell time and the disengage component of attention, leaving the question of whether threat stimuli affect the shift component of attention open to debate.The nature of the relations between cognition and emotion has a long history.For example, in The Art of Rhetoric Aristotle (trans.1991) foreshadowed contemporary cognitive theories of emotion with his assertion that one's belief about an object determines the emotional reaction to that object.It is not the external object per se that is critical, but rather the individuals belief about that object (see Power & Dalgleish, 1997).This notion is reflected in many contemporary theories of emotion that argue that the initial appraisal of a situation or object (as benign, positive, or negative) is one of the major determinants of the emotional response to that situation (e.g., Lazarus, 1966;Mandler, 1984;Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987).These theories of normal emotion have their parallel in theories of emotional disorder, which argue that disordered emotions such as depression and anxiety might stem from disorders of thinking.To illustrate, the influential theory outlined by Aaron Beck (e.g., Beck, 1976) proposed that depression is characterized by dysfunctional schemata reflecting a cognitive triad that focuses on negative views of the self, of the world, and of the future.Beck's cognitive theory of emotional disorders led to the testable prediction that people in depressive and anxious mood states should demonstrate very general mood congruent biases in cognitive processing.For instance, a depressed individual should be more likely to both notice and remember negative information in comparison with positive or neutral information.A large research literature has partially supported this prediction in finding mood congruent biases under some conditions.However, it turns out that the pattern of cognitive bias observed in emotional disorder is far more specific than Beck's model predicts.As reviewed by Williams, Watts, MacLeod, and Mathews (1988, 1997) mood congruent memory biases are reasonably well established in depression (but not in anxiety), whereas mood congruent attentional biases are well established in anxiety (but