Identifying Anxiety Subtypes Based on Individual Differences in Threat-Related Attentional Bias, Physiological Reactivity, and Affective Ratings: A Latent Profile Analysis

Anxiety is a prevalent and debilitating phenomenon. Although the DSM-5 offers useful classification guidelines, overlapping symptoms across categories of anxiety highlight the need for transdiagnostic approaches. Threat processing, closely linked to anxiety, offers a promising pathway for such exploration. Threat processing involves various neurocognitive and psychophysiological mechanisms, including visual cortical responses, physiological reactivity, and affective ratings. This study examined whether different anxiety subtypes could be identified based on individual differences in threat processing. A total of 211 undergraduate students were recruited, with 198 included in the analyses. Threat-related measures included attentional bias competition indices derived from Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials in the visual cortex, heart rate, skin conductance responses, and arousal/valence ratings. Anxiety-related measures included self-report questionnaires and momentary assessments using experience sampling methods. Latent profile analysis revealed three distinct profiles: Profile 1 (n=114; 58%) was labelled as “low psychophysiological but high psychological affective reactivity”, Profile 2 (n=59; 30%) as “low psychophysiological affective reactivity”, and Profile 3 (n=25; 13%) as “high psychophysiological affective arousal”. However, these different threat-related profiles did not reflect major differences in the anxiety-related measures, either in questionnaires or momentary assessments. These findings offer preliminary insight into distinct threat-processing profiles in anxiety and highlight the need for further research, especially with larger samples and more variance in anxiety.