We review the role of top down processes on the regulation of disengagement.

HTA have difficulty to shift and engage to the target during the emotional processing of the threatening faces.

Abstract

Background and objectives Recent work suggests that the ability to disengage attention from threatening information is impaired in anxiety. The present study compared the difficulty to disengage from angry, fearful and neutral faces in Low Trait Anxious individuals (LTA) versus High Trait Anxious individuals (HTA) at two stages of facial expression processing (i.e., initial and later face processing).

Methods HTA and LTA individuals performed an attentional shifting task to assess attentional disengagement. Participants had to classify a peripheral target letter, appearing 200 or 500 ms after a face was displayed.

Results LTA individuals were quicker when the letter appears after 500 ms compared to 200 ms regardless of the emotion of the face. An impaired disengagement in HTA individuals was observed for fearful and angry faces (i.e., no reaction differences between 200 and 500 ms) but not for neutral faces. These results suggest that it is particularly difficult for anxious individuals to switch attention from one stimulus to another if the engaged stimulus is a threatening face.

Limitations Generalisation of our results is restricted to trait anxiety and emotional facial expression processing.