Anxiety-related threat processing: Delayed disengagement of attention and cardiac reaction to emotional pictures

This study examined the anxiety-related attention bias towards threat with physiological and behavioural indices of attention. Participants ( N = 92) completed an evoked cardiac reaction paradigm and a cued-target detection task including threatening, positively valenced, and neutral pictures. Orienting reflex, prolonged processing, and ability to disengage attention were the dependent variables of interest. Initial and prolonged heart rate deceleration suggested that all participants showed a bias towards threatening compared to positive or neutral pictures at early and later stages of information processing. Delayed disengagement from threatening compared to positively valenced or neutral cues was observed in the entire sample. Within-group comparisons revealed that high trait anxious participants' (n = 42) heart rate deceleration was steeper, suggesting a larger orienting reflex, and ability to delay disengagement was more inhibited for threatening compared to positively valence or neutral pictures. Within the low trait anxious group ( n = 50) heart rate deceleration did not vary based on emotional content of the picture and delayed disengagement from threatening cues was evident in comparison to positively valenced but not neutral cues. Results indicated the presence of a normative threat bias at early and later stages of information processing and an inhibited ability to pull attention away from threat.;A greater understanding of threat processing was obtained through theory driven application of psychophysiological measures and cognitive experimental tasks. The attentional bias towards threat was evident at early and later stages of information-processing and the present results add support to the more recent hypothesis that the threat bias involves delayed disengagement. Furthermore, results highlighted that for those with high levels of anxiety, threatening information holds a consistent and distinctive status throughout information-processing systems.