Cheongil Kim¹, Juyoen Hur¹, Jeong Hyeon Park¹, Sang Chul Chong¹; ¹Yonsei University

Are anxious individuals aware that their attention is excessively captured by threat-related stimuli, such as an angry face? If so, how accurate is this awareness? Accurate attentional monitoring is crucial for anxious individuals to effectively control their maladaptive attentional bias toward threat, as it enables them to recognize whether and to what extent attentional control is necessary. However, despite extensive research on attentional bias and control, little is known about attentional monitoring in anxiety. Adopting a novel approach that involves average facial expression and attentional allocation judgments (N = 70 young adults), the present study investigates how accurately individuals monitor their attentional bias toward an angry face and whether this ability is associated with anxiety levels (i.e., state and trait anxiety scores) measured using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). We presented two faces with different intensities of anger (i.e., near neutral and full-blown-angry faces) simultaneously and asked participants to judge the average facial expression of the two faces and their relative attentional allocation between them (e.g., 39% vs. 61%). We first quantified the strength of attentional bias by assessing the extent of bias toward anger in the average facial expression judgment. Then, we measured attentional monitoring abilities based on how accurately participants’ attentional allocation judgments corresponded to their attentional bias. Our findings demonstrate that individuals can monitor their attentional bias toward an angry face. However, anxious individuals tend to underestimate their attentional bias compared to non-anxious individuals, despite their intact ability to monitor trial-by-trial variations in attentional bias. This underestimation may lead to a misjudgment of the necessity for attentional control and could explain why anxious individuals exhibit impaired attentional control. This study provides a novel theoretical framework that incorporates attentional monitoring to understand attentional mechanisms in anxiety more comprehensively.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (RS-2022-NR070542).