Recoiling From Threat: Anxiety Is Related to Heightened Suppression of Threat, Not Increased Attention to Threat

Abstract

Increased attention to threat is considered a core feature of anxiety. However, there are multiple mechanisms of attention and multiple types of threat, and the relationships among attention, threat, and anxiety are poorly understood. In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to separately isolate attentional selection (N2pc) and suppression (PD) of pictorial threats (photos of weapons, snakes, etc.) and conditioned threats (colored shapes paired with electric shock). In a sample of 48 young adults, both threat types were initially selected for increased attention (an N2pc), but only conditioned threats elicited subsequent suppression (a PD) and a reaction time (RT) bias. Levels of trait anxiety were unrelated to N2pc amplitude, but increased anxiety was associated with larger PDs (i.e., greater suppression) and reduced RT bias to conditioned threats. These results suggest that anxious individuals do not pay more attention to threats but rather engage more attentional suppression to overcome threats.

Working Memory Performance for Differentially Conditioned Stimuli

“…Instead, RTs did not significantly differ between CS+, CS-, and N conditions across each load, with our Bayes Factor analyses providing evidence for these null effects. These outcomes conflict with previous behavioral reports of longer RTs for CS+ compared to CS-stimuli (Koster et al, 2004;Dowd et al, 2016;Kappenman et al, 2021), and when a CS+ was presented as a distracter compared to a CS- (Schmidt et al, 2015a). Despite the nonsignificant findings from our primary RT analyses, we did observe significant RT difference scores between CS+ and CSconditions across both loads.…”

“…For example, previous work also failed to identify behavioral differences in working memory storage, despite observing neural markers indicating alterations in the storage and maintenance of stimuli in working memory (Basten et al, 2012;Meconi et al, 2014;Qi et al, 2014a,b;Ward et al, 2020). In line with these findings, others have also criticized the use of behavioral markers when assessing other cognitive processes, such as RT, compared to the use of more temporally precise neural measures (Kappenman et al, 2014(Kappenman et al, , 2015(Kappenman et al, , 2021. Importantly, Kappenman et al (2021) argued that distinct attentional processes are confounded in behavioral measures, likely contributing to their poor reliability and lack of consistency across studies.…”

“…In line with these findings, others have also criticized the use of behavioral markers when assessing other cognitive processes, such as RT, compared to the use of more temporally precise neural measures (Kappenman et al, 2014(Kappenman et al, , 2015(Kappenman et al, , 2021. Importantly, Kappenman et al (2021) argued that distinct attentional processes are confounded in behavioral measures, likely contributing to their poor reliability and lack of consistency across studies. Similarly, it may be the case that significant differences in the storage of conditioned CS+ and CSstimuli are unlikely to be observed using accuracy or Pashler's K scores, and instead are only observable under the lens of psychophysiological and neuroimaging techniques.…”

Effects of task load, spatial attention, and trait anxiety on neuronal responses to fearful and neutral faces

“…We used only two load levels while examining a broader range of load levels that might reveal specific (e.g., nonlinear) relationships between load and fearful-neutral differences (see Schindler, Gutewort, et al, 2020). We observed no trait anxiety effects on ERPs based on a sample containing healthy individuals with subclinical trait anxiety scores exhibiting similar trait anxiety variations as in a recent study that observed relationships between trait anxiety and conditioned threat (see Kappenman et al, 2021;but see Schindler et al, 2022). It has been discussed whether trait fearfulness might be more predictive of general threat responses than trait anxiety (Panitz et al, 2018).…”

Working memory content guides attention

“…(2015) supported that anxiety would not always be related to deficits in attentional control, but it found that individuals with anxiety showed increased attention control under high cognitive load. Moreover, anxious individuals would elicit more attentional suppression, which, when indexed by the Pd component, reflected an active process of suppression (Hickey et al., 2009) to reduce the effect of threats in the dot-probe task (Kappenman et al., 2021). Furthermore, another recent study showed that highly anxious individuals were able to actively suppress distractors, inducing the Pd component, as they may compensate for deficient control functions by allocating greater effort (Gaspar & McDonald, 2018; Derryberry & Reed, 2002).…”