Spatial Attention is Captured and Suppressed by Emotional Pictures in High Trait Anxiety

Physically salient objects capture spatial attention in a stimulus-driven way but this can be suppressed (Wang & Theeuwes, 2018). In a recent study, color singletons associated with emotional value captured attention but was resistant to suppression at locations where distractors occured frequently (Kim & Anderson, 2021). Meanwhile, emotional capture and suppression of spatial attention may depend on the individual emotional traits such as anxiety. The current study rigorously tested this using the mouse device in subclinical high and low trait anxiety individuals. 96 participants recruited on-line were instructed to detect a circle among rectangles containing horizontal or vertical bars, and report the bar orientation in it. They reported by making mouse movements to the corresponding response box at the circle’s location presented peripherally and clicking it with the right or left mouse button. When distractors were present, one of the rectangles was a picture containing emotional or neutral context. Distractors appeared more frequently on one location (suppressed) than the other three. Mouse trajectory deviations from the straight line from the display center to the response box was used as the dependent measures. STAI-Y2 was collected for measuring state anxiety and groups were divided into high and low (moderate, no-low). Both negative and neutral distractors were attracted towards distractors at low frequency locations. Here, deviation was greater for negative distractors for high anxiety only. When distractors were at high frequency locations, trajectories were generally pushed away from the distractor. Emotional differences in trajectory were not observed at high frequency locations in any group. First, this suggests that emotional capture of spatial attention is modulated by individual anxiety traits. Also results suggest that even in high anxiety groups emotional distractors can be suppressed and this can be observed when using a sensitive measure of spatial attention such as mouse-tracking.