Anxiety modulates voluntary attentional orienting to emotional gaze cues: Eye movements for pro- and anti-saccades.

The present study examined the effect of trait anxiety on voluntary orienting and inhibitory control responses triggered by averted gaze in emotional faces (fearful, happy, and neutral) in a mixed pro- and anti-saccade task. High- and low-anxious groups did not differ in terms of error rates, but the results showed that high-anxious individuals were slower to initiate a saccade in response to eye-gaze cues for fearful faces, irrespective of whether a pro- or anti-saccade was required. The present results support the Attentional Control Theory (ACT), which proposes that anxiety impairs processing efficiency but not performance effectiveness. Our findings also showed how anxiety biases are characterized by a general impairment to disengage from fearful faces, and this could potentially lead to challenges with attending to, and processing, relevant information in the environment that might be of social significance.