Individual attentional bias is positive or negative? It depends on trait anxiety

The debate on whether the general population exhibits a positive or negative attentional bias has been ongoing. Some studies suggest that attentional bias is not necessarily a common characteristic among individuals, but rather varies on an individual basis. The aim of this study is to investigate the association between trait anxiety and attentional bias and its neural correlates. Seventy human adults with varying levels of trait anxiety participated in a novel emotional competition search task, where happy and angry faces were simultaneously presented amidst multiple neutral faces, with one emotional face as the target and another as the distractor. In the non-competition condition, one happy or angry face was presented among the neutral faces. An event-related potential (ERP) indicator of attentional selection, the N2pc, was used to measure individual attentional bias and to investigate whether this bias occurs in a top-down (towards targets) or bottom-up (towards distractors) manner. Our ERP results revealed a significant correlation between individuals’ levels of trait anxiety and their attentional biases. Specifically, lower levels of anxiety were associated with a stronger positive emotional bias, i.e., a larger N2pc for happy faces than angry faces, while higher levels of anxiety were linked to more pronounced negative bias. Additionally, this anxiety-associated attentional bias specifically manifested in bottom-up processes and in the emotion-competition condition. Our study provides electrophysiological evidence demonstrating that individual trait anxiety is associated with the emotional direction of attentional bias primarily through a stimulus-driven attentional process. This finding has implications for cognitive interventions targeting anxiety disorders.