I didn't See that you were Angry: Preattentive Bias to Emotional Faces in Trait-Anxiety

Abstract

According to cognitive theories of anxiety, anxious individuals' information-processing is characterized by a hypervigilance for threat. It can be argued that this hypervigilance should be manifest in the preattentive detection of natural threat stimuli such as angry and threatening facial expressions, that is, in the detection of threat stimuli independent of whether or not they are spatially attended. The present research was stimulated by Byrne and Eysenck's (1995) claim that high trait-anxiety individuals preattentively detect angry but not happy facial expressions of emotion. Several modified replications of that visual search experiment, using non-clinical high-trait and low-trait anxious individuals, are reported. A general failure to find any supporting evidence raises questions about the utility of the visual search task as a diagnostic of preattentive bias to facial affect. Complex attentional processes involved in anxiety may be automatic in some respects, but are probably not preattentive in the rigorous sense of that term.