title: State anxiety impairs attentional control when other sources of control are minimal.
abstract: Research suggests anxiety impairs attentional control; however, this effect has been unreliable. We argue that anxiety's impairment of attentional control is subtle, and can be obscured by other non-emotional sources of control. We demonstrate this by examining conflict adaptation, an enhancement in attentional control following a trial with high conflict between distracter and target stimuli. Participants completed a Stroop task featuring incongruent (e.g. RED in green font; high-conflict) and control (e.g. +++ in green font; low-conflict) trials. More state-anxious participants showed greater Stroop interference following control trials, but interference was uniformly low following incongruent trials. This suggests state anxiety can impair attention, but other sources of top-down control - such as conflict adaptation - can easily overcome this impairment. This is consistent with recent theories of anxious cognition and shows that anxiety researchers must attend to the dynamics and sources of attentional control.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , MEF University , Istanbul , Turkey.
authors.forename: Robert W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Booth
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , MEF University , Istanbul , Turkey.
authors.forename: Müjde
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Peker
mesh_terms: D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D000068356:Self-Control / Q000523:psychology*; D057190:Stroop Test; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Anxiety; Stroop; attentional control; conflict adaptation; reactive control