TY - JOUR PY - 2004// TI - Vigilance for threat: effects of anxiety and defensiveness JO - Personality and individual differences A1 - Ioannou, Michel C. A1 - Mogg, Karin A1 - Bradley, Brendan P. SP - 1879 EP - 1891 VL - 36 IS - 8 N2 - Eysenck's (1997) theory that attentional biases for threat vary as an interactive function of trait anxiety and defensiveness was tested using a visual probe task. Two stimulus exposure conditions were used to explore a secondary issue concerning attentional allocation over time. Results indicated that, among high trait anxious participants, only those with low levels of defensiveness showed vigilance for threatening faces presented for 500 ms. They also showed an attentional preference for neutral faces, relative to happy faces, irrespective of exposure condition. This pattern was reversed in high trait anxious participants with high levels of defensiveness, who showed an attentional bias towards happy faces (relative to neutral faces) under both exposure conditions. The findings are discussed in relation to their implications for (a) the significance of measures of defensiveness for the conceptualization of high trait anxious individuals, and (b) the status of anxiety-related biases at different stages of information processing.

LA - SN - 0191-8869 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2003.08.018 ID - ref1 ER -