Fight, Not Flight! Avoidant Goals Strengthen Attentional Biases During Increased Anxiety in Healthy Adults

Heightened anxiety can impair perceptual-motor performance, with detrimental effects potentially arising, in part, from threat-related attentional biases and interpretations. Shifting from a flight (i.e., threat) mindset to a fight (i.e., challenge) mindset may be an effective strategy for coping with anxiety and improving performance on perceptual-motor tasks. In this context, the present study examined how differences in fight-or-flight behavioral goals, represented by hit or avoidance actions, influence attentional control in response to threatening stimuli during heightened anxiety. Healthy adult participants performed a visual probe task, with half responding to a probe target in hit mode and the other half responding in avoidance mode. Anxiety levels were manipulated using the threat-of-shock (ToS) method, which significantly increased the participants’ anxiety. Participants with avoidance goals exhibited significantly delayed responses when avoiding a target in the presence of threat-related stimulus cues under the ToS condition. Conversely, no changes in response times were observed between the ToS and no ToS conditions in those with hit goals. These results suggest that when anxiety is heightened, avoidance goals induce attentional biases toward threat-related stimuli. In conclusion, encouraging avoidance of potential threat-related sources as an action mode may be counterproductive for coping with heightened anxiety, at least in healthy adults. The study’s principal implication for clinical practice is that adopting fight-like behavioral goals in response to threats may be an effective strategy for managing anxiety in everyday life.